Glass 
Book 



PROCEEDINGS AT* A RECEPTION 



IN HONOR OF THE 





Rev. O. B. FROTHINGHAM 



INDEPENDENT LIBERAL CHURCH 

AT THE UNION LEAGUE THEATRE 

TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL 22, 1 8 79 

TOGETHER WITH THE REPORT OF THE FAREWELL SERMON 
DELIVERED BY HIM AT MASONIC TEMPLE 
APRIL 27, 1879 




GIVEN BY THE 



NEW YORK 



G . 



P. 



PUTNAM'S SONS 



182 FIFTH AVENUE 



Press of 
G. P. Putnam s Sons 
New York. 



CONTENTS. 



FAREWELL RECEPTION 



Preliminary . . . • . 

Addresses 

The Hon. Frank Fuller 

Geo. Haven Putnam 

George William Curtis 

Prof. Felix Adler 

The Rev. John W. Chadwick 

Col. Thomas W. Higginson . 

Edmund C. Stedman 

The Rev. Samuel Longfellow 

The Rev. Joseph May 

The Rev. O. B. Frothingham 

Letters 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Wm. Lloyd Garrison 
George Ripley 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 
The Rev. Chas. G. Ames 
The Rev. Samuel Johnson 
Joseph H. Choate . 
The Rev. Wm. J. Potter 



FAREWELL SERVICE 



Prayer 67 

Sermon — Twenty Years of an Independent Ministry 66 



RECEPTION TO 



OCTAVIUS BROOKS FR O THING HAM 



THE Reception given at the Union League Thea- 
tre, April 22d, 1879, m honor of the Rev. O. B. 
FROTHINGHAM, was of such peculiar interest to those who 
hold the Liberal Faith dear that it has been thought well 
to preserve some record of it in printed form. 

Mr. FROTHINGHAM had, early in the year, announced his 
desire to seek rest, by travel abroad, from the severe intel- 
lectual strain of an unbroken service of twenty years, and 
had tendered his resignation of the pastorate of the Inde- 
pendent Liberal Church, to take effect from the 1st of May. 
The Trustees of the church, being unwilling to lose him 
altogether, had persuaded him to withdraw his resignation 
and to take a vacation of a year or more. Knowing the 
earnest desire of the members of his congregation to meet 
him once more socially, and, in giving him a farewell greet- 
ing, to express in some measure their appreciation of his 
work for them and for the community, they resolved to 
invite the members of the Society, together with a few 
friends of Mr. FROTHINGHAM and of the cause, to meet 
him for that purpose, and appointed from their own number 
as a committee to make the necessary arrangements, J. H. 
Morse, Geo. Haven Putnam, and Frank Fuller. 

It soon became apparent to the committee that Mr. 



8 



THE FR 0 THINGHA M RECEPTION. 



FROTHINGHAM's hearers had keen ears and listened to his 
preaching from far-away corners of the land. The desire 
to shake hands with him and bid him God-speed brought 
applications for invitations from all quarters, and in num- 
bers far beyond the capacity of the hall selected for the 
meeting, and the task of the committee in making the final 
selection was by no means an easy one. 

On the evening of April 22d, the reception-room and 
parlors of the theatre were filled to overflowing with an 
audience bright, interested, and enthusiastic. One recog- 
nized on every side the faces of men and women whose 
influence in literature, art, and science, in affairs private and 
public, in charitable work and beneficent reform, is matter 
of public history. 

To have won such an audience, — so kindly, so intelli- 
gent, so warmly appreciative, so full of good works, — must 
surely have made even Mr. FROTHINGHAM sensible that 
his labors in the direction of practical piety had not been 
in vain. 

On the platform, besides the guest of the evening and 
the Trustees of the church, were Mr. George W. Curtis, 
Col. T. W. Higginson, Prof. Felix Adler, Mr. Edmund C. 
Stedman, Rev. Samuel Longfellow, Prof. Ogden N. Rood, 
Rev. Joseph May, Mr. Richard H. Stoddard, Mr. Oliver 
Johnson, Rev. William I. Potter, of New Bedford, Rev. J. 
W. Chadwick, of Brooklyn, Prof. Vincenzo Botta, and Rev. 
W. T. Clarke, of the Evening Express. 

In the audience (if we may play the reporter and call 
a few names, — and Mr. FROTHINGHAM's Society are not 
unused to the " chiel amang 'em takin' notes ") were, 
among others : — Mr. and Mrs. Calvert Vaux, Mr. Jervis 
McEntee, Mr. and Mrs. S. R. Gifford, Mr. and Mrs. R. Swain 



THE FRO THING HA M RE CEP TION. 9 

Gifford, Mrs. M. P. Jacobi, Mr. C. D. Gambrill, Mr. and Mrs. 
Clarence Cook, Mr. C. P. Cranch and daughter, Mr. Edvv. 
F. Underhill, Eliot C. Cowdin, Hon. Hugh McCulloch and 
family, Prof, and Mrs. Charlton T. Lewis, Mr. Noah Brooks, 
Mrs. Charles L. Brace, Mrs. C. R. Lowell, Mrs. F. P. Bar- 
low, Mr. Chas. H. Webb, Mr. and Mrs. C. A. Runkle, 
Miss Augusta Larned, Mrs. Abby Sage Richardson, Hon. 
D. B. Eaton and wife, Dr. T. M. Coan and sister, Hon. 
A. J. Dittenhoffer, Mr. and Mrs. Junius Henri Browne, 
Mr. M. J. Heade, Mr. Samuel Wilkinson, Dr. H. Knapp, 
Mr. A. J. Johnson and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. F. W r . 
Christern, Mr. and Mrs. Hermann, Mr. Sinclair Tousey, 
Mrs. James G. Birney, Mr. Charles Collins, Dr. and Mrs. 
J. H. Emerson, Mrs. Stoddard, Mrs. Stedman, Mrs. Hig- 
ginson, Mrs. Geo. Haven Putnam, Mrs. Morse, Mrs. Fuller, 
the Misses Dixwell, Mrs. Ogden N. Rood, Miss Hillard, 
Mrs. E. S. Mills, Mrs. Gilchrist and daughter, of Lon- 
don, Mr. Chas. H. Farnham, Mrs. J. Dillon, Mrs. Edw. 
Curtis, Mrs. Villard, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wilkinson, Mrs. 
D. G. Croly, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Cheever, Mrs. Albert G. 
Browne, Mr. Merritt Trimble, Mrs. John Hopper, Mr. 
Samuel Shethar and daughter, Mrs. Wallace, Mrs. Groot, 
Col. J. H. Meredith, Mr. J. M. Mestre, Col. and Mrs. Stone, 
Mr. W. T. Richards, Dr. and Mrs. J. P. Mann, Mr. C. E. 
Adams, Dr. and Mrs. Longstreet, Mr. J. Lockwood, Dr. 
Louis Warner, Mrs. Tolles, Hon. H. D. Townsend, Mrs. 
Charles Watrous, Mr. H. T. Lockwood, Mrs. Laura Curtis 
Bullard, and Mrs. O. W. Bird. 



TO 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



Shortly after 8 o'clock, the chairman of the evening, 
Ex-Gov. Frank Fuller, called the meeting to order, 
and said : 

I am deputed by my associates of the committee to 
tender a cordial welcome to our friend and pastor who is 
to-night our honored guest, to those distinguished gentle- 
men who have come from far and near to testify their 
regard for the man and his work, and to the members of 
the society and their friends, who have gathered together 
to do him honor. 

If it were permitted me to inspire the sentiment of this 
occasion, I would say : Let every face be wreathed in 
smiles ; let every heart be glad ; let joy be unconfmed. 
This is no sad and tearful leave-taking between pastor and 
people. It is merely the closing scene of a brilliant act, 
covering a fifth of a century. All these years the actor has 
been before us, in books, in varied writings, in pulpit and 
in platform utterances. In all these years he has never 
spared himself. He has taken upon himself tasks which 
few men of stronger physique could endure. His brief 
summer vacations have usually brought only a change of 
work. Constant writing has taken the place of constant 
speaking, and he has returned to his city labors with no 
real consciousness of added bodily or mental vigor. He 
needs rest ; rest absolute and entire ; that perfect rest which 
comes to us only when we feel that we can drift away 
whithersoever we will, utterly free from care and under no 
pledge to return and resume the harness. We rejoice that 
our good friend is permitted to enter upon this period of 
idleness and rest, with every sense undimmed, every faculty 
in complete training, and with that perfect capacity for 
enjoyment which makes sight-seeing enjoyable, travel de- 



FRANK FULLER. 



lightful, and rest regenerating. No tinge of gloom must 
cloud this sunny picture ; no minor note of sadness must 
mingle with the music of the hour. 

Perhaps it is almost trivial to allude to the mere methods 
by which Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S great work has been 
achieved. And yet we must recognize these as a part of 
the man, a condition of his success; and I question much, 
if any of us who have been strengthened by his ministra- 
tions, will ever forget the perfection of his oratorical system. 
Year after year I have sat in his presence, and have waited 
for that supreme moment when, the beautiful preliminary 
service ended, he has deliberately severed his connection 
with the reading-desk and has bravely placed ten feet of 
space between himself and any base of supplies, — any 
source of relief, whatever the exigency. A hundred times 
I have whispered to the good lady beside me, (I hope my 
friend has forgiven me for whispering in church,) "he burns 
his ships behind him ; " — though I always had a lingering 
doubt of the appropriateness of the simile, for I do not 
believe a mind so richly freighted, with such a wonderful 
spread of intellectual canvas, has needed any ships to float 
its marvellous wealth of argument, of illustration, of fact, 
of imagery. You who are public speakers know what it is 
to stand thus alone before a vast audience, alert, watchful, 
seeing you, and you only. You who are ministers know 
well the tremendous value of a " scrap of paper." You 
have seen the time when a half sheet of note-paper, 
crammed with hieroglyphics unintelligible to any eye save 
yours, would not have been exchanged by you for a similar 
fragment made legal tender for the best sum which the 
Treasury Department has authority to print ; because upon 
that scroll depended the symmetry, the roundness, the per- 



1 2 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

fection, the effectiveness of your discourse. The notes of 
your speech are the notes which call for specie payment 
from the golden coinage of your brain, and these are worth 
far more to you than the notes of any bank, however re- 
deemable. You who are lawyers know well the value of 
your brief. You to whom the public platform has become 
as familiar as your native heath, can yet appreciate the 
value of a desk hard by, scattered with fragments of paper 
seemingly of little worth, yet capable of kindling your im- 
agination into fervent heat. Mr. Edward Everett told me 
— and I do not think I violate his confidence in repeating 
it — that every line of his great oration on the character of 
Washington, was written out and carefully memorized ; that 
weeks, and I think he said months, were expended in re- 
peating it aloud in the privacy of his study, and that in 
spite of all his care, his first half dozen public utterances of 
that eloquent production were but imperfect rehearsals, 
gradually becoming more perfect until his own critical sense 
was satisfied. Mr. Rufus Choate, one of the most won- 
derful orators that our land has ever produced, assured me 
that he never ventured upon a prolonged effort without 
committing his thoughts to paper. I have had occasion to 
know something of the methods of a very large number of 
our best public speakers during the last twenty-five years, 
and I can remember but one who, without putting pen to 
paper, could venture to cut himself adrift, even once, for a 
single hour, and to stand alone, with only his theme, before 
an expectant multitude. This our friend has done, not 
once merely, but habitually ; with never a lapse, never a 
failure, never a solecism, never an error of taste or judg- 
ment ; always affluent in language, copious in illustration, 
convincing in logic, in argument impregnable. His dis- 



FRANK FULLER. I 3 

courses have been, as all admit, models of compactness, 
of symmetry and of strength ; while his personal manner 
has been recognized as the embodiment of grace itself. 

Of his services in the cause of humanity, of his great in- 
fluence over the morals, the literature, the politics, and pre- 
eminently over the religion of the period, I may not speak, 
since other and more eloquent tongues will seek to render 
unto him fitting tribute in this regard. But we cannot for- 
get how he never ceased to strike sturdy blows for freedom, 
until the glad sun no longer rose upon a master, nor set 
upon a slave ; we know how earnest he has ever been in the 
advocacy of temperance and the highest morality ; we have 
seen his love and sympathy for the weak, the ignorant, the 
lowly — the little children of the race ; we can testify to his 
unswerving advocacy of the just claims of woman ; we know 
indeed how strong, active, earnest, helpful he has ever been 
in all good works. 

Who can say how many lives have been made sweeter 
and purer and brighter for his ministrations ? I know I 
voice the sentiment of some, and I believe I rightly inter- 
pret the general feeling of his people, when I say that no 
words spoken by human lips have ever conveyed to the sad 
heart higher consolation than those which he has uttered. 
I know that in those calamities which are the common lot 
of all but the utterly friendless — which are sufficient to 
make utterly friendless even the most favored,— poor, bur- 
dened human hearts have found a sufficient friend and 
comforter in him. I know how his love of nature has per- 
vaded the hearts of those about him, painting the lily with 
new tints and adorning the rose with added beauty. I 
know how books have developed for us new charms through 
his interpretation; how art has been glorified and music 



1 4 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RECEPTION. 

made more tuneful, and how every good and glorious 
achievement of men and women in all ages has become 
sacred and hallowed to our hearts through his teachings. 
I know how through him we have come to reverence .the 
teachers, the prophets, the saviours of mankind. 

How broad has been his charity, how bounteous his 
liberality ! how grand, lasting and infectious has been his 
enthusiasm — that quality which is the very life of gifted 
souls ! How ready and generous and vivifying has been 
his sympathy with us in our work, our failures, our successes, 
our joys, our hopes, our aspirations! How have his words 
comforted us in our afflictions, and sustained us in our 
griefs ! 

I think the experience of one of us may be taken as a 
type of the experience of all. Discouragements, trials, dis- 
appointments, losses have come to us, and we have been 
tired and sick of all together. Common words have be- 
come tasteless things and all effort hateful. The oar has 
slackened, the strong arm has fallen listless, and we have 
tired of contending with the mad race of waters and have 
longed to put out of the current into some quiet cove, 
where sunbeams glitter in golden rings and over-hanging 
trees make sweet music and soft whisperings ; or perchance 
the darkness of danger or sorrow has blotted out the light 
of earthly hopes, or has hidden the path which had been 
trodden so confidently ; or, as has been the sad experience 
of so many of us, the dark shadow of death has fallen be- 
fore and around us, turning the bright heavens into lead, 
the green earth into dust, and despondency and gloom have 
settled down like a dark cloud upon our hearts, and the 
glowing page of literature has been stricken of its charms, 
and the dream-land of sound has had tones in it that are 



GEORGE HA VEN PUTA T AM. I 5 

heart-wringing, and painting has lost its color, and nature 
her bloom and beauty, and her serene, ineffable composure 
has pained us like the indifference of some fondly-loved 
friend, or her myriad voices have been discord in our ears, 
" like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh," — then has 
this sweet magician pointed us tcf the pathway of duty, the 
hallowed avenue of noble deeds and kindly acts, leading up 
to the temple of perfect peace, and with words of consola- 
tion, of encouragement, of hope, has shown us the silver 
lining to every cloud, and has taught us with renewed 
stiength to rise as on eagle's wings. 

A word to the members of the society who suffer the 
poignant pang of parting. This much-needed rest which 
our good friend seeks — how nobly has he earned it, how 
gladly we accord it. Let us with cheerful hearts say to 
him, " Go and find renovation amid new scenes and new 
peoples ! Fill up the undying springs of life and thought 
from new sources of inspiration and replenishment ! Come 
back to those who love you, if you can, and as soon as 
you can, assured of open arms and open hearts to wel- 
come you ; and, in any event, may every blessing and all 
good gifts be lavished upon you and yours." 

The Chairman. I will call upon one of my associates — a 
gentleman who has been brought up in the society ; who 
knows its history, and can state many interesting facts con- 
cerning the work of Mr. FROTHINGHAM. I have the plea- 
sure of introducing- Mr. George Haven Putnam. 

Mr. PUTNAM. Notwithstanding my friend Fuller's refer- 
ence to my knowledge of ancient ecclesiastical history, I 
am myself but one of the younger members of the society, 
and can lay no claim to speak for it. I certainly am glad, 



i6 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



however, of the opportunity of expressing my own sense of 
the value and importance of the work of Mr. FROTHINGHAM 
during the past twenty years, not only to us his parishoners, 
but to the community at large and to the intellectual life 
of the time. The cessation of this work will be felt as a 
personal loss by a great itumber of admirers and sympa- 
thizers, in addition to the large circle of personal friends 
who have grown up about him during his ministry. 

The history of the society is not a long one. In 1859, 
Mr. FROTHINGHAM, who was at that time carrying on some 
kind of a liberal mission in the wilds of Jersey City, was in- 
vited to New York at the instance more especially of John 
Hopper, J. S. Taylor and Geo. Lyman. A congregation 
was speedily gathered about him, which, in i860, was incor- 
porated under the name of the " Third Unitarian Society 
of the City of New York." For three years they held their 
services in halls, — first in 33d and later in 33d Street. On 
Christmas Day, 1863, was dedicated the only church build- 
ing we ever possessed, — the edifice in 40th Street — now 
occupied by the congregation of the Rev. Dr. Ewer, (for 
whom some further dedication Avas probably found neces- 
sary.) The building was not considered a success archi- 
tecturally, and failed to meet the requirements of the 
society, and in 1869 it was sold, and the society took 
possession of Lyric Hall. In 1875 they removed to Masonic 
Temple, which they still occupy. In 1874 the name of the 
society was changed from the Third Unitarian to the " Inde- 
pendent Liberal Church." This step, as I understand, was 
not taken on account of any change in our own theological 
position (if we may be said to have a theological position), 
but rather in deference to the feelings of some of our more 
orthodox Unitarian friends, who were sometimes troubled 



GE OR GE HA VEN PU TNA M. I 7 

at being held responsible for the utterances from our 
pulpit. 

During the nineteen years of its corporate existence, the 
society has increased steadily in numbers and influence, 
and if its growth in numbers may not have fully kept 
pace with the extending reputation of its pastor, the ex- 
planation is, I think, not far to seek. 

His teachings addressed themselves naturally to the 
younger and more enterprising minds in the community, 
the men whose convictions were in process of being formed. 
Among these were fewer of the wealthier citizens whose po- 
sitions in life were assured, and whose residence in the city 
was permanent. The fluctuating element in the congrega- 
tion was therefore always exceptionally large ; and many 
of our earlier members were called aw r ay by their work to 
California, Colorado, Utah, New jersey and other distant 
lands. If this scattering of its material was a decided loss 
to the society, we may console ourselves with the idea that 
it was in many ways a gain to the liberal cause, in that it 
helped to establish new centres of liberal influence and to 
leaven public opinion throughout the land. 

We claim further, however, that work such as that of our 
pastor is not to be measured or estimated by the size of 
congregations or the sumptuousness of church edifices. He 
belongs to a small but noteworthy group of men who, while 
not always speaking the language that reaches directly to 
the multitude, have confided to them the still more impor- 
tant task of teaching the teachers, of helping to shape the 
thought of the thinkers, and in whose hands, or rather on 
whose heads rests the responsibility for the direction of a 
large part of the intellectual life of the time ; a group of 
which we have with us here to-night some distinguished 



i8 



THE FR O THINGHA M RECEPTION. 



representatives, and of which the acknowledged type 
and leader in this country is Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
There is not a cultivated writer of our race and generation 
who can escape the influence of the ideas of Emerson, 
and these will be found woven into the fabric of many 
writings differing widely from each other in character and 
purpose. And in like manner there is not an earnest, 
scholarly preacher in the land, whose sermons are not 
modified, more or less consciously by the teachings of 
Parker and Frothingham. These cannot be evaded, will 
not be fought down. They can be heard to-day from hun- 
dreds of orthodox pulpits. They are loosening and dissolv- 
ing the bonds of the grim Puritan creeds in which the keen 
New England intellects have been held as in a vice. They 
are putting into the shadowy realm of historic myths the 
dogmas of the Thirty-nine Articles, the Westminster Cate- 
chism, and the Saybrook Platform. They underlie our 
literature, they shape our conduct. 

Mr. FROTHINGHAM's position has been in many ways a 
peculiar one. His work as he has shaped it, has isolated 
him in a great measure from the other leaders and teachers 
in the community ; so that in this great city, during the 
larger part of his pastorate, he has been able to count upon 
the cooperation of hardly a single fellow laborer. Our so- 
ciety practically has formed a denomination all by itself, of 
which our pastor was at once Bishop, Priest, and governing 
Synod. Partly as a cause, and partly as an effect of this 
isolation, Mr. FROTHINGHAM, especially in the earlier years 
of his work, was very much misunderstood by the com- 
munity in which he worked. He has been dreaded, de- 
rided, prayed against (and doubtless also prayed for) by 
thousands of good orthodox people, whose only impres- 



GE OR GE HA VEA T P U TNA M. 1 9 

sions of him were derived from absurdly grotesque mis- 
representations of his sermons. Because his convictions 
compelled him to assail with incisive and destructive criti- 
cism dogmas and theological systems which he believed to 
be outgrown, untrue for the generation, and therefore per- 
nicious, he has been charged with endeavoring to subvert 
the foundations of society and morality. Inferences such 
as these remind one of the logic of the old pro-slavery ad- 
vocates, who used to imagine they had triumphantly an- 
swered your appeal for justice to the slave by the pertinent 
question, " would you wish your daughter to marry a ne- 
gro ? " What was the case with the pastor was true, though 
of course to a much less extent, with his society. We have 
been considered to be a wild, dangerous lot, full of vague 
and incendiary ideas. I think it was not many years ago 
that in a trial between some good orthodox fellow citizens, 
in which a member of our society happened to be called as 
a witness, the attempt was made to discredit his testimony 
on the ground that no person could be worthy of trust who 
sat under such preaching as ours. 

It is very certain, however, that the last ten years have 
witnessed a decided change in the relations of our pastor 
and our society to the community and to public opinion, 
and, as I am not aware that we have done anything especial 
to amend the error of our ways, I can only assume that there 
has been an advance in public opinion. Mr. FrOTHINGHAM 
is now recognized as a living force in the communitv, and is 
accepted, even by decided theological opponents, as an earn- 
est, able teacher, working for the best good of his fellow- 
men as he understands it. And as for his society, I think 
it is also beginning to be understood that men who for the 
sake of convictions, forego the many conveniences and ad- 



20 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



vantages of denominational associations, are at least as likely 
to be trustworthy citizens as any who may still remain safely 
ensconced in orthodox folds. 

If I have understood rightly Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S teach- 
ings, he has maintained that, important as it was for a man's 
beliefs to be sound, and in accordance with his higher rea- 
son, the essential thing for purposes of manliness and cha- 
racter is that they should be to him real and vital, and not 
the mere husks of dead creeds. He holds that convictions, 
to be worth anything, must be worked out by each man for 
himself, and not be simply accepted with the local preju- 
dices of the village in which he was born, or as an heirloom 
with the run-down works of his grandfather's clock. A man 
who has honestly possessed himself of the dogmas of half a 
dozen mediaeval creeds, may, at least if he escape aggres- 
sive fanaticism, have in him the making of a good citizen. 
The man who honestly doubts the accepted beliefs of his 
time, and who, through his skepticism, incurs the unpopu- 
larity that always falls upon him who opposes the faith of 
the majority — that man is nearly always a good citizen. 
But he who holds on to the empty form of a faith which he 
has outgrown and which is no longer real to him, or he 
who, still worse, puts on the name of a creed that has never 
meant anything to him, has never been a part of himself — 
that man has in him the making of a bad citizen. It is he 
who recruits the ranks of the respectable defaulters and 
swindlers and demoralizers of society. 

With all the eloquence and power that is in him, Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM has fought the falsity and demoralizing in- 
fluence of untrue and outgrown creeds; and I say it is a 
great thing for the moral tone and the intellectual integ- 
rity of a community when it has in its midst at least one 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



21 



man who, possessing the full courage of his convictions, and 
fearing the authority of no bishops, presbyteries, priests or 
deacons — no, not even of his trustees — will stand up week 
after week and set forth with all the power that is in 
him the simple truth as he knows it. As an example of 
moral manliness, of unflinching courage, and of unselfish 
devotion to the great cause of spiritual and intellectual 
liberty, as well as of one of the intellectual leaders of 
his day, all honor is due and will be given to the name 
of O. B. Frothingham. 

The Chairman. I have no courage, and no disposition, 
ladies and gentlemen, to seek for words with which to do 
honor to the distinguished gentleman upon whom I shall 
now call — the matchless orator, the profound thinker, whom 
it is now my privilege to introduce — Mr. GEORGE WILLIAM 
Curtis. 

Mr. Curtis then spoke as follows : 

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. Despite what it 
has pleased our Chairman to say, there is always something 
a little sad in saying " good bye," except indeed to bores 
and bad habits, and especially to say it to a man whose go- 
ing leaves among so many friends nothing but regret, which 
will not disappear until he comes home again. 

I confess, and I am sure that you will share with me the 
feeling, that I have a very profound sympathy for our friend 
Frothingham this evening. It is not that he is going to 
Europe, but it is that this is one of those occasions when a 
man is obliged to sit still and hear precisely what his friends 
think of him ; and unless I am exceedingly mistaken, before 
we gentlemen on this platform have done with him, he will 
have heard so much truth about himself that if he had not 



22 



THE FR 0 THINGHA M RECEPTION. 



proved in innumerable ways his indomitable courage, he 
would certainly take his hat and slip out of the door. The 
truth is that our friend is one of those Americans who are 
so good that it is permitted to them to go to Paris before 
they die ; and if he had any occasion — which I think we 
know very well he has not — to test the regard in which he 
is i held in this community, he could have chosen no other 
way so craftily as this of taking his passage next week to 
sail away amid the pathetic music of a thousand heartfelt 
farewells. 

I remember a good many years ago when I was about 
sailing for Europe, a friend of mine said to me very ruefully, 
for he could not go, " Now, if you will promise to write me 
a letter from the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, I will do 
the best I can, and I will answer you from the City Hall 
steps in New York." I feel very confident that if we w*ere 
to write to our traveller upon his journey, he would not be 
very apt to reply to us from Rome, or from Canterbury, or 
from Geneva ; I should expect his response rather from the 
Thuringian forest — from the old German castle in which 
Martin Luther hurled his inkstand at the devil, because for 
many a year this gentleman has been throwing his tongue 
and his life at the same personage. 

As he sails away, we shall find it very hard in this coun- 
try to find any man who has maintained more steadfastly or 
more carefully the fundamental American principle of lib- 
erty. America means, if it means anything, fair play, free 
thought, free speech, free act with perfect regard to the 
equal rights of every other person ; and yet unquestionably, 
while America stands for individual independence, Amer- 
ican institutions continually tend to dwarf the individual by 
magnifying the majority, so that the minority, whether 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 23 

it be one or many, finds it exceedingly difficult to keep 
upon its feet. It is so easy to drift with the current of your 
party and your sect, it is so easy to accept fashion in opin- 
ion as we do in dress, that presently conformity comes to 
be identified with good sense, with intelligence, with a just 
conservatism, and with respectability. In fact, I think we 
avenge our own cowardice by slandering the courage that 
rebukes us, and we accept the law which God has written 
upon the consciences of others as a rule of life for ourselves, 
against the law that He has written upon our own hearts. 

Artemus Ward said that he was perfectly resigned to 
sending his wife's relatives to the war, and most of us if you 
observe it, are perfectly willing that our wife's relations 
should send us for instance, to church. Now the man 
among us who stands fast for the absolute liberty of the 
individual against his neighbor, if need be, against his coun- 
try and against his race, the man who asserts the indomit- 
able and indefeasible right of the individual, is first and 
foremost an American citizen. I know nothing finer in the 
life of the gentlest of men, Dr. Channing, than that in the 
case of a man whose opinions were doubtless absolutely re- 
pugnant to his own, a man whose methods of propagating 
his opinions doubtless shocked the refinement of Channing's 
feeling and the delicacy of his nature, he nevertheless placed 
all his fame, all his power, all the fineness of his genius, all 
his standing in society as a flame of fire to envelope and 
guard the independence of Abner Kneeland. 

Now the man who, as a public teacher in this or any other 
community maintains this principle, who makes this the 
text, the theme, the gospel of glad tidings of his preaching, 
whose heart and mind lie hospitably always open to every 
cause, to every aspiration, to every human hope like the 



24 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

golden tropic in which the sweetest fruits constantly spring, 
or the eastern caravansary that is open day and night to 
every wind of heaven, and over which the eternal stars 
shine he is an American benefactor ; he is an American 
patriot. And this, ladies and gentlemen, as your hearts 
know, and as my tongue gladly and gratefully testifies — this 
is the praise of Octavius Frothingham. 

You will not fear, I am sure, that I propose to go through 
the catalogue of his virtues, but I wish in one word more 
only to draw your attention to a cognate public service 
which he has rendered in this community. It is not that 
such teaching as his asserts the necessity and the duty of 
every man to form his own opinions for himself and cour- 
ageously to abide by them, but it is that both his teaching 
and his life have shown us the vast superiority of character 
to creed. There is a very general disposition on the part of 
most people to be exceedingly troubled about the beliefs, 
and especially the theological religious beliefs, of other peo- 
ple, without observing the very important fact that in actual 
human conduct we pay very slight attention to the creed 
that a man tells us he holds. 

I remember, that Dr. Channing, when he was a boy, went 
in Newport to hear — I don't know if it was Dr. Hopkins — 
(Mr. Higginson can tell you) — it was, perhaps, the successor 
of Dr. Hopkins. The entire congregation was duly sent to 
hell, and when the service was over, the little pale, shudder- 
ing boy, trotting along by the side of his father, saw his 
parents quietly sailing out of church and everybody asking 
everybody else about their health and wondering if the din- 
was going to be well cooked. And the little boy, pale and 
breathless, his soul tossing with excitement, looked in his 
father's face and said, " But father, if we are all to go eter- 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 2$ 

nally to hell, what difference does it make about the din- 
ner?" And indeed if it be really a fact that the great 
mass of mankind are under sentence of roasting forever, 
what difference does it make whether the beef on Sunday is 
more or less roasted? If our good friends seriously suppose 
that it is of prime, of vital, of essential importance that we 
should believe this thing or that thing, why do they not 
show some higher sense of the importance of belief? If, at 
this moment, I were in danger of plunging head first from 
this platform, if any man was seen to be in peril of some 
great accident, if horses were running upon him, if some ob- 
struction were put in the way of a train, there is not one of 
these gentlemen who is so concerned about the beliefs of 
others but would instantly hurry to save that fellow man 
from the merest temporary human calamity. If they really 
believed — in the sense that the words import — that their 
neighbor was in eternal peril, is it conceivable that they 
would have any heart, any hand except for his salvation ? 
Does not this seem to show that this is an assertion of the 
lips rather than a vital belief ? 

If a man going down to Jericho falls among thieves, and is 
beaten and bruised, the Good Samaritan — (and our ortho- 
dox friends know it perfectly well) — the Good Samaritan is 
as likely as not to be a man with a very doubtful belief, or 
with no belief at all. If there be any great work of charity, 
of justice, of humanity, men of every faith, as of every age, 
of every temperament and of every complexion, join hand 
and heart and set the world a little forward. 

Even so orthodox a clergyman as Whitfield, who was 
wiser than he knew, in the story that you remember so well 
— he began his sermon with raising his eyes to heaven, and 
calling upon Father Abraham : " Father Abraham, are there 



26 



THE TROTH INGHAM RECEPTION. 



any Protestants in Heaven?" " No." "Are there any 
Catholics in Heaven?" "No." "Any Presbyterians?" 
"No." "Any Baptists?" "No." And well might he 
have extended his inquiry, as Mr. de Normandie lately says 
— "Any Pagans?" "No." "Any Christians?" "No." 
"Well, Father Abraham, are you all alone in heaven?" 
And down came the response — the response written upon 
the human heart thousands of years before it was written 
in any book ; " In every nation the man that fears God and 
works righteousness is accepted of Him." 

And now, my friends, you take leave of a teacher who, 
almost unaided, has stood in a community practically alien 
for twenty years, and, unknown to the most of that com- 
munity, has maintained its very corner stone and the foun- 
dations of its continued existence. You take leave of your 
teacher, and as he sails away I know that your hearts go 
out to him in the prayer of the child for his parent. " Oh, 
God, make the winds blow softly on him while he sails the 
sea." 

We cannot be surprised, I think, that he goes. So much 
of all the sources and roots of our life are in Europe, that 
we turn to it, as Hawthorne said of England, as to our Old 
Home. Europe sits beyond the sea and sings to us like a 
siren. She woos and wins our friend not for the first time. 

" He will see the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome." 

But, good American that he is, he will return from Egypt 
and the Orient, Samarcand and Kashgar, if so far he goes, 
from the Alps and Italy, all the better American, that he is 
rooted so strongly in what is best here and what is best 
there. He goes one citizen only of many millions, one 
teacher only of ten thousand. But, — I have said it a 



FELIX ABLER. 2*] 

hundred times behind his back, and with all my heart I say 
it now before his face and to your faces — he will leave be- 
hind him no citizen of a loftier life, no teacher of a more 
unquailing courage. 

The Chairman. I think, ladies and gentlemen, we can 
now fully understand, if we have never understood before, 
why Mr. Mark Twain has made it a condition, when invited 
to speak, that he shall not immediately follow Mr. Curtis. 
He told me that his reputation was nearly ruined at a cer- 
tain society dinner at which he spoke some two or three 
years ago on this account, and that his only salvation was 
in the fact that he was able to introduce some eighteen or 
nineteen different varieties of weather which Mr. Curtis 
knew nothing about. I confess it is somewhat unfair to call 
upon any individual after such a speech as this to which we 
have just listened. But I know there are gentlemen pres- 
ent who will graciously consent to bear witness to the truth 
which is in them. One of these I shall now have the plea- 
sure of calling upon. He is a distinguished scholar, a pro- 
found thinker, who has created out of his own resources a 
vast society, which has perhaps, in its own quiet way, ac- 
complished more good among the poor than any other in 
New York in the same period. I have the pleasure of in- 
troducing Prof. Felix Adler. 

Mr. Adler said : Ladies and gentlemen, the difficulties 
of my position have already been described to you by the 
chairman. I should indeed feel quite at a loss how to en- 
gage your attention after the eloquent address you have 
just heard, did not my heart prompt me to speak a brief 
word at least to you this evening, the sincerity of which 
may atone for the feebleness of its expression. It is a sad 



28 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



word which I have to say. It saddens me to think that Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM should go even for a short interval from 
amongst us. There is so much work to be done, he has 
wielded so broad an influence for goodness and for liberty 
in this community, which, Heaven knows, needs all such in- 
fluence to counterbalance the opposing tendencies toward 
evil and bigotry, that no one who is truly interested in our 
cause can see him depart without feelings of anxiety and 
deep regret. If there were ten men ready to step into Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM'S place and carry on his work, we should none 
the less feel that there still remained a vacancy. But that 
there are not such ten men to be found — I mean such as are 
not tied down to their own tasks and could undertake an 
absent fellow-worker's duties — is even more deplorable. 
Nay, why do I say ten ; there are not five, there are not 
three, there is not in this great country one who could do it. 
Our gathering this evening brings home to me more forcibly 
than ever a thought that has often weighed on my mind : 
Liberals must be more earnest in laboring to perpetuate 
their principles. If we believe that our convictions are 
sound and true and most precious, then we must see to it 
that they fail not for lack of devoted servants, of teachers, 
of preachers, of apostles. We must provide for a succession 
of liberal leaders, otherwise we shall have again and again 
to face the mortifying experience that the most promising 
free religious societies fall to pieces when the personal mag- 
net is withdrawn that held them together. Now, why do I 
speak of this matter ? To conjure up the spectre at the festi- 
val? No, but because I believe that Mr. FROTHINGHAM has 
recognized the same fatal deficiency in the liberal movement 
as carried on hitherto that I allude to, and because I fear 
that the thought of it may distress him now in the hour of 



FELIX ABLER. 29 

his departure. Yet he at least who, in his great modest}', is 
inclined to underrate his services, ought not to be allowed 
to dwell too much on what remains to be achieved. It is 
true, institutions count for much, very much, and no idea 
can permanently exist without them, but personality coun^ 
for even more. And Mr. FROTHINGHHAM'S personality has 
been invaluable. The lofty character, against which suspicion 
has not even dared to breath its poisoned breath ; the exalted 
purity by which he has maintained the liberal movement, 
as far as his commanding influence reached, free from the 
stigma of moral baseness which its enemies would so gladly 
fix upon it ; the moral courage with which for the greater 
part of twenty years he fought single-handed the monster 
superstition, have not been vain, nor can they be forgotten. 
He has wrought more good than he knows of; he has sown 
seeds whose bloom and fruition he could not see ; he has 
cheered numberless hearts in their struggles out of dark- 
ness ; he has made the way incomparably easier for those 
who came after him. No one is more profoundly sensible 
of this fact than I am, and it is both a duty and a pleasure 
to express on the part of many who agree with me the grati- 
tude which we so truly feel. Theodore Parker, who knew 
from his own rich experience the difficulties of a liberal 
leader's position, defined the work of a liberal in the follow- 
ing w r ay, showing what it is not, and what it is. He said : 
" The work of a liberal is not like gathering flowers in a 
summer meadow ; it is like diving deep into stormy water 
and bringing up with pain the pearl of the twisted shell." 
Mr. FROTHINGHAM, you have never shunned the danger of 
diving into stormy waters, but you have brought up many 
pearls also whose lustre will remain undimmed in your ab- 
sence, and which will be treasured for lasting remembrance 



3 O THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

in the hearts of the many friends that admire and love you. 

The Chairman. And now I know I may be permitted 
to call upon the scholar, poet, preacher, essayist, the friend 
,pf humanity, the representative of liberal religion in our sis- 
ter city, the Rev. Mr. Chadwick, of Brooklyn. 

Mr. Chadwick then spoke as follows: Ladies and gen- 
tlemen, notwithstanding the very kindly manner in which I 
have been introduced to you by your chairman, I see "by 
the expression of your eye," if 1 may be allowed to use a 
somewhat hackneyed quotation, that you are well aware 
that the reason why I have been called upon to address you 
at this particular juncture is that you may have a rest be- 
tween the honeyed sweetness of those speakers who have 
preceded me, and whose speaking is "as musical as Apollo's 
lute," and the honeyed sweetness of those who will come 
after me ; for whether the Old Testament be authoritative 
upon all points or not, it is certainly very good authority 
upon this point — that it is not good for a man to eat too 
much honey. Darwin says, in his Descent of Man, that if 
all women were as beautiful as the Venus of Milo, or the 
Venus de Medici (I forget which he says ; I hope he says 
the Venus of Milo, because I don't like the other one very 
well myself), that if all women were as beautiful as the 
Venus of Milo, men would long for a little change — any 
change would be a relief to us ; and I am quite confi- 
dent that after the addresses to which you have listened 
(and those that you will listen to will be of much the same 
sort), almost anything different will be a relief. 

Now, can you imagine how the Brooklyn pier of the great 
suspension bridge would feel if it should wake up some fine 
morning and find that its companion and vis a vis across 



JOHN W. CHAD WICK. 3 I 

the river was taking itself down and packing itself up pre- 
paratory to going off to Europe for a year or eighteen 
months? Now do not, my dear friends, I beg of you, 
imagine that I intend, by this perhaps unfortunate illustra- 
tion, a villainous pun, and to suggest to you that I am in 
any way the " peer " of Mr. FROTHINGHAM. Certainly noth- 
ing of that sort. But just as, for the last fifteen years, I 
have been standing up in Brooklyn for rational religion as 
stiffly and straightly as I knew how, letting as much light 
go through me as was consistent with my general structure, 
and being much more particular to get a good hold on earth 
than to reach up very far into the clouds, it has been a great 
consolation and strength to me to know that Mr. FROTHIXG- 
HAM, over here in New York, was standing up in his own 
way as stiffly as a man could stand, going down a great deal 
deeper and reaching up a great deal higher than I ever 
could. 

Those of you who have read Thackeray's Philip — and I 
suppose you have all done so — will remember that at one 
time when his dear Charlotte is riding along somewhere in 
France — from Boulogne to Paris, if I remember rightly — she 
hears Philip's boots kicking on the top of the diligence 
over her head, and her little sister, who is resting in her 
arms, starting from her sleep, she says, " Hush ! hush ! 
He's there, he's there ; " as much as to say if he was there 
it must be all right of course ; there couldn't anything very 
wrong happen to any one. And so again and again when 
the child that is within me — you know Plato's Socrates 
talks about the child within us that is afraid of death — 
sometimes when the child within me has been a little fright- 
ened perhaps, or when it has been rather dark and lonely, I 
have said to myself, " He's there ; he's there, over across 



3 2 THE FR 0 TH1NGHA M RE CEP TION. 

the river. It is all right; don't be afraid; drive on." 

But really, dear friends, I do want to give my personal 
thanks to Mr. FROTHINGHAM this evening for all the good 
that he has done me. It was about twenty years ago that 
a word of his first came to me. It was a sermon which he 
preached at an ordination in Philadelphia on " The Chris- 
tian Consciousness." I didn't hear it — I read it — and I 
think perhaps it was just as well for me that I didn't hear 
it. Dr. Holland, in his Katlirina, speaking of his hero at 
some important juncture, says of him that " He felt the 
bud of being in him burst," and while I have never had a 
very distinct idea of what that meant — what sort of a sen- 
sation he experienced on that occasion — perhaps I should 
have experienced something of the same sensation if I had 
heard Mr. FROTHINGHAM's sermon instead of merely reading 
it. I did read it ; I read it over and over again, and it did 
my soul good ; and I have kept it ever since and have it 
now, and from that day to this I have read every word that 
he has printed that I could get hold of, and I cannot begin 
to tell you what joy and strength and peace and help have 
come to me from his words from time to time. And when 
to the word I have been able to add the voice, which I did 
for the first time on the very day (I have often been glad 
to think of it) — on the very day that I left the quiet re- 
treats at Cambridge to start out on my own life as a 
preacher, I heard his voice for the first time — and whenever 
I have been able to hear it since, you know how much it 
has added to the word to hear it spoken. 

Then, too, I have a very special reason for being grateful 
to Mr. FROTHINGHAM, — because when he had been here in 
New York about two years — in 1861 I think it was — the 
people in Brooklyn of my society then being without a 



JOHN W. CHAD WICK. 33 

minister, did their best to induce him to leave this little 
island of Manhattan and go over to the big one on the 
other side of the river. That would have been a very good 
thing for them, but it would have been a very unfortunate 
thing for me. I don't think I should ever have begun to 
be so happy as I have been if I had never gone to Brook- 
lyn, although I should never have known, of course, what 
it was that made me so unhappy. Father Taylor, perhaps 
you may remember, said of Mr. Emerson that if he should 
go to hell he would change the temperature of the place 
and from thenceforth the emigration would set that way ; 
and I have no doubt that if Mr. FROTHINGHAM had gone 
to Brooklyn, even if he had not changed the temperature 
of the place, the emigration would have set that way. 1 I^ut 
I think that Mr. FROTHINGHAM has changed the tempera- 
ture of the whole land, and, paradoxical as it may seem, I 
think he has at the same time made it milder and more 
bracing than it was before. 

When Theodore Parker was dying far away from home, 
in Italy, he said, " There are two Theodore Parkers now ; 
one is dying here in Italy, but there is another living in 
America, who will continue to live and carry on my work." 
And now while Mr. FROTHINGHAM is going away from 
America for a little while — only for a little while — I am 
glad that there is going to be another O. B. Frothingham 
here in America who will live here and carry on his work. 
You have all of you read the story of " My Double, and 
how he undid me," but this double of Mr. FROTHINGHAM's 
will not serve him any such shabby trick, because this 
double of Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S is his own self embodied in 
his printed words, which have gone east and west and north 
and south throughout this whole country, and often far be- 



3 4 THE FR 0 THIN GHA M RE CEP TION. 

yond its shores. And I have sometimes thought that it is 
not you people of New York, who from Sunday to Sunday 
and from year to year have enjoyed hearing him so much, 
though I do not doubt in the least degree your enthusiasm 
or appreciation — I have sometimes thought that you were 
not the people to whom he had been most, and who would 
be the saddest if his voice should cease from its utterances 
for any great length of time. I think the people to whom 
he has been most are those little knots of people — some- 
times only one man or woman here and there, far off from 
others in quiet lonely places. There these printed words of 
your minister have been nuclei for earnest men and women 
to gather round, and when they, afar off, hear that even for 
a little while his voice has ceased from its usual speaking, I 
know it will be a sad hour for them ; only as in the old 
times the people on the outskirts of our American civiliza- 
tion didn't hear which president was elected until the next 
one had come in, so I trust that these people will not hear 
that Mr. FROTHINGHAM has gone away until he is fairly 
back again and lifting up his voice once more among you. 

And I want to thank him here this evening, myself, as 
one of hundreds of young men whom I know, for I am glad 
to count myself among the young men — the rising genera- 
tion, — I want to thank Mr. FROTHINGHAM for hundreds of 
people — (he will not believe it himself, but it is so) — who 
have read his sermons as they have gone forth in the land 
until they are dog-eared, until they are worn out. 

" Servant of God, well done. Rest from thy loved em- 
ploy." I believe that comes out of a funeral hymn, but 
this is no funeral. I do not for one moment entertain the 
idea that Mr. FROTHINGHAM is going abroad for anything 
in this world, — some people seem to have got the absurd 



JOHN IV. CHAD WICK. 35 

idea in their heads (I don't see how it got there) that he 
was going for something else — I do not propose for one 
moment to entertain the idea that he is going abroad for 
anything but to have a good, long vacation, a vacation 
which he has grandly earned, a vacation which I am free to 
say he needs more than he would otherwise need, because 
he has been using up his other vacations for the last ten 
years working harder than he has worked the remainder of 
the time. 

There was an old parson down at Marblehead who used 
to pray every Sunday for those who go down to the sea in 
ships, " May they be blessed with a perpetual calm." Now 
that isn't so absurd in these days of steam-vessels as it was 
in the old time of sailing vessels, but still I will not wish 
that for Mr. FROTHINGHAM ; but I will wish that all winds 
may blow him fair, and that over on the other side he will 
find the best of friends, see all good sights and hear all 
pleasant sounds, and that he will store up all these things 
in his heart and bring them back to us in good season, 
coming back stronger in body and in mind. I am sure that 
nowhere can he go where he will find as good friends as he 
has found here among you, and that no moment of the time 
he is away will be so happy to him as that moment when 
again in Masonic Hall, or elsewhere, he shall stand before 
his own people and again lift up his voice to them, leading 
them in the way in which he has always led them, and 
shaming them in the way he has always shamed them by 
the beautiful ideals of social and individual life with which 
he has inspired your minds and comforted your hearts. 

The Chairman. I now desire to introduce the noble ac- 
tor upon the stage of progress, the man of advanced thought, 



3 6 THE FR O THING HA M RE CEP TION. 

the especial defender and advocate of the claims of woman, 
Col. Thomas W. Higginson. 

Mr. HIGGINSON said : Mr. Chairman ; these too flattering 
epithets which you graciously distribute among us like a 
good housekeeper making tea — one spoonful for each person 
and one for the teapot — make us all share something of Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM's solicitudes this evening, if we cannot share 
his laurels. 

We know for what we have come here — to do him honor. 
We all come joyfully — so joyfully that it is hard to restrain 
ourselves from saying a little too much, and I hardly think 
that any of us will properly supply that other side — that 
needful criticism, and point out the faults, which is doubt- 
less important for the welfare of even his soul. Mrs. Julia 
Ward Howe used to say of the Boston Radical Club, that 
to read an essay there was like undergoing the ancient pun- 
ishment of being smeared with honey, and then hung up to 
be stung to death by wasps. Tn this kindlier arrangement, 
our business is the honey, and as I understand that Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM is to have half an hour for himself when we 
have done with him, he must be his own wasp and do his 
own stinging. 

I think that the appearance of this crowded room and 
this well-filled platform, are a sufficient refutation of that 
charge of exceeding solitariness which is the only serious 
imputation I have seen brought for a long time against our 
friend. I noticed it in the Literary World of last week, 
and a wholesome caution was implied, (which I think was 
scarcely necessary) to rising young clergymen, not to culti- 
vate that quality to too great an extent in their own cases, 
lest they should lose their parishes. Solitariness has always 



THOMAS W. HIG GIN SON. 37 

its fortunate limit, however, with radicals. The German 
Henry Heine said that there was never a German so crazy 
that he did not find some other German a little more 
crazy, to stand by him. I trust that that has been the ex- 
perience of our friend. If he has had his little monomanias, 
he is not the only one, it is only they have not appeared 
quite so becomingly on the rest of us. He has experienced 
and always will, what Wendell Phillips once mentioned to 
me as the one compensation of a reformer for much that 
he lost — the warm, deep, immortal, personal friendship that 
the labors of reform create among those who have once 
entered on their stern career. 

I am not, ladies and gentlemen, one of those fortunate 
youths who have appeared before us in succession, and have 
called our attention to the fact — without much considera- 
tion, perhaps, of the feelings of their elders — that they re- 
present the rising generation, and that they in a manner 
look upon Mr. FROTHINGHAM as their spiritual father. I 
should be glad to be in the company of his children ; but I 
must go back to earlier remembrances to-night, and say, 
what not many here perhaps could say, that I remember 
Mr. FROTHINGHAM in the days so far back in history that 
he was not even a radical. I remember him in his college 
days. I suppose I am the only person in this room except 
himself who read his autobiography in the class book at 
Harvard College, and I suppose I am the only person, not 
excepting himself, who has the slightest recollection of 
what there was in it. But I remember that in that auto- 
biography there was not a line from which any one would 
have dreamed that a great reformatory leader was entering 
on his career. Not that it was conservative especially — it 
was not quite pronounced enough to be conservative ; not 



3 8 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

that it was timid — I don't believe he was timid in his cradle 
— but it was the position of a young man on the threshold 
of life, not yet awakened to its demands, doubting a little 
whether after all the world was not hollow, and his particu- 
lar doll was not stuffed with sawdust. A great many such 
biographies have been written — we all write a great many 
more biographies at the age of eighteen, you know, than we 
ever have time for in later life — but it marked what to me 
has alw.ays been a distinguishing point in his career, the 
point which has constituted a large part of his peculiar 
usefulness and of his special relations, I do not doubt, to 
the minds of a great many here — the fact, namely, that he 
was not one of those who are born radicals, who, by their 
very nature, are iconoclasts, and in antagonism from early 
life to the position of those around them. He belongs to 
the class I might almost call higher — only that one does not 
wish to discriminate — the class of those who, without be- 
ing born radical, have radicalism by a tyrannous conscience 
thrust upon them, and spend their lives in doing, not the 
work that their whole nature longs to do, but a work from 
which much in their temperament shrinks, and would 
gladly be excused. These men are radicals, not by rea- 
son of temperament, but because conscience comes into 
their lives and overrides their temperament, — crushes it, if 
need be, and says, "you must spend your life as a radical 
whether you wish to do it or not." 

It is this peculiar quality of temperament that has differ- 
enced Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S work from the work of many 
of us. It is because the things that came easy to many 
came hard to him ; because many may have, as some one 
has said to-night, burned their ships behind them, but he 
loved his ships, and his heart clung to them as he saw them 



THOMAS W. HIGGINSON. 39 

burn. That is his peculiar power. It is the power of a 
man conservative in temperament but supremely radical in 
conscience ; the power that enables him to go to the refined 
and reach them, to touch the intellectual young man and 
say, " Sacrifice, if need be, the roses and the poetry, your 
tastes and your habits, and come and walk on my stern 
pathway with me." That peculiar power is what, when the 
lives of all the radicals of to-day are written, will be written 
against the name of OCTAVIUS FROTHINGHAM, and sepa- 
rate him from almost all other reformers I have ever 
known. 

He gained a great deal by this. He gained safety from 
the vulgar and vague radicalism — the attitude that dear old 
Abby Folsom used to represent in the anti-slavery meetings 
when she said that all the world needed was to abolish all 
existing institutions and establish a series of free meetings. 
He gained the power of access to cultivated people as Na- 
poleon's Monsieur de Narbonne gained it with the courts 
of Europe, because he also was in his manner a man of the 
old regime, and only in his convictions belonged to the new. 
Old Horace Walpole, who had a hearty dislike of the clergy, 
vouchsafed a word of praise to Launcelot Blackburn, Bishop 
of York. He admitted that there was a man with the man- 
ners of a gentleman, although he had been a pirate, and 
was a clergyman. In Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S case, I suppose, 
the good churchman would say that the clergyman came 
first and the pirate afterwards. No matter ; he could not 
deny that the manners of a gentleman are here. 

To reach the most cultivated classes a man must have 
known something of the surroundings they have ; he must 
be able to weigh the thoughts that have weight with 
them, and not merely social!}', but intellectual!}' to share 



40 THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 

the life that he asks them to lead. This is what our 
friend has done ; and there are multitudes in the country, 
there are many in this hall, I doubt not, who would say 
and say truly, that in this direction he has had for them 
a peculiar power, a hold upon their intellects, and their 
hearts such as is not precisely represented by Emerson, 
Parker or Garrison. Parker in his magnificent vigor, his 
" brave plebeian soul," as he wrote once in the descrip- 
tion of Martin Luther that always seemed to me to de- 
scribe himself, his vast, affluent, sometimes coarse strength, 
with, as he used to say of himself, seven generations 
of strong farmers behind him and he wielding the hoe and 
the spade for all — Parker had his peculiar power. If Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM lived a hundred years, and preached better 
every year, he never could preach in the way Theodore 
Parker did, or have the kind of hold that he had upon his 
audiences. But I do not see how any one can read Sunday 
by Sunday Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S sermons as they are re- 
ported, and then compare them with an equal number of 
Parker's sermons preached Sunday by Sunday, and not see 
that, however it may be with the affluent homely illustra- 
tion, however it may be with the great warmth and great 
sympathy that touch thousands in Parker's presence — 
however it may be with them, yet for solid continuous 
thinking, you, of Mr. FROTHINGHAM'S congregation, have 
had Sunday after Sunday a quantity and a quality such 
as are not to be found in an equal number of sermons of 
the great Boston preacher. The difference is in tempera- 
ment, quality, in peculiar power. , 

I do not doubt, as has been said, that there has been a 
steady growth of influence here. I rejoiced to see in London 
last year the, same growth of influence in the congregation of 



THOMAS W. HICiGINSON. 4 1 

Moncure Conway, which is perhaps the congregation of the 
world that is least unlike this. I have noticed it year by 
year in visiting New York and in hearing reports from Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM'S meetings. It has sometimes been coupled 
with solicitude. I have heard it said sometimes that he 
was getting too popular. I heard an anxious lady say once 
that she noticed a steady improvement in the bonnets of 
the congregation as she came from year to year to New 
York. These things are perilous ; but, after all, the world 
moves on, prejudices vanish, the most alarming doctrines 
we present do not seem so alarming as they did twenty 
years ago. Lady Adelaide Lindsay, who was famous 
for being less good looking than any English woman of 
her time, (and that at that period was a strong expression), 
said in later life when somebody thought she was look- 
ing a little better, Yes, she believed the bloom of her ugli- 
ness was rather passing by. I think it is true of all 
religious radicals and women's rights reformers, and all 
the rest of them, that the bloom of their ugliness is 
passing. We are getting a little nearer into respectable 
society, and perhaps the influence will go on so during our 
friend's absence, that when he comes back he will hardly 
recognize us. But in the meantime the work he has done 
goes with him, and its influence here will go on. 

Something was said about the possibility that if his name 
should get into an encyclopaedia he would appear as a very 
dangerous being. We cannot count much on that, the 
danger there is all the other way. The time may come, 
if he lives and does well, when we shall have to prove for 
him, as we have had to prove in Boston lately, in regard 
to Dr. Channing, that he was not actually an evangelical 
believer, but had some spots of liberalism in him after 



42 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

all. So the time will come when you will have to con- 
vince your children that Mr. FROTHINGHAM did not 
altogether stand for the conservative theology of his day. 
If you doubt it, look at the great Biographic Generate of 
Paris — the great biographical dictionary of the world. Of 
course, it does not leave out Theodore Parker's name, it 
gives twenty lines to something called Theodore Parker. 
And in these twenty lines the Biographic Gcnc'rale records 
for the benefit of all coming time that Theodore Parker 
Avas a great preacher, who devoted himself to vindicating 
the infallibility of the scriptures and the divinity of our 
Lord ! Who knows that our friend, with all his well 
meant efforts, will be any more accurately reported than 
that ? 

Friends, let me say this one thing in closing: What he 
has done for you and for me and for all of us is not so much 
that he has brought us any truth, or even any system of 
truth, as that his whole life and teaching have been a hand 
pointing us where to seek truth for ourselves. Without 
this he might have been a founder of a sect, and you might 
all have been under the painful necessity of labelling your- 
selves " Frothinghamians." With this, he has risen above 
sects and helped us to rise above them ; he has told us that 
the word is very nigh to us — in our mouth and in our heart 
— if we would only seek it. 

I remember hearing, once of a sea captain who lost his 
reckoning in crossing the Atlantic, and drifted far south — 
farther and farther. He did not know where he was for 
days ; he was short of food, short of water. At last, after 
many days, a vessel came in sight. He signalled; the sig- 
nals were answered. He could not quite make out the an- 
swer ; he was not near enough. He signalled again, " Water ! 



E. C. STEDMAN. 43 

give us water!" Again came an answering signal. He 
could not make it out. The vessel came nearer and nearer, 
got within hailing distance ; he could signal with his voice 
at last, " Water ! give us water ! " There came a motion of 
the hands that at first he could not understand, and pres- 
ently there came back the answering hail, " Dip it up ; dip 
it up. You are in the Amazon." 

We are all floating in the ocean of truth — an ocean of 
fresh, sweet water. He who helps us is not the man who 
ladles it out to us- glass by glass, but the man who tells us 
to seek it for ourselves and we shall find it. 

The Chairman. I know of nothing so sad as to undertake 
a task which we are unable to perform. I have been trying 
to induce one of our own to make some remarks — one 
whom Ave honor, one of whom we are proud, one who unites 
the culture of the scholar with the sweet grace of the poet, 
and the successful man of affairs. I have been vainly striv- 
ing to get Mr. Stedman to say something. Will you help 
me ? 

Mr. Stedmax then spoke as follows : I should have 
shrunk from a duty and have lost a pleasure if I were not 
able to add my voice to that of the better men who have 
spoken to you to-night in testimony of their debt of grati- 
tude to Mr. FROTHINGHAM. 

In listening to Mr. Curtis, and hearing his delicately veil- 
ed doubt of the belief of many of the orthodox classes in 
their own expressions, the thought came to my mind that 
he received a different bringing up from my own. In fact, 
the early age at which he found himself at Brook Farm 
shows that this must have been the case. I was trained in 
the family of a Puritan of the strictest sort. We were al- 



44 THE FR O THIN GHA M RE CEP TION. 

lowed to read no books on Sunday except the Bible, Sun- 
day-school books, and two works which did much mischief 
unawares — Bunyan's Pilgrim s Progress and Milton's Para- 
dise Lost. Those were supposed to be sound, and, indeed, 
their theology is sufficiently dismal. 

But the mental stimulus they afforded served to cultivate 
the imagination, and did not prevent me from thinking for 
myself. In our region people seriously believed in condem- 
nation after death, and went around with gloomy faces in 
that faith. This I never could understand ; my whole nature 
was antagonistic to such creeds. It was my instinct to be- 
lieve in what was beautiful, and I could see nothing beauti- 
ful in the Deity that we were instructed to adore. But I 
led a busy life, and wandered around, and was scarcely aware 
that any one in this great city believed as I did. I felt al- 
most like a heathen in this town, and rarely went to church 
at all. One day I picked up a mutilated heading of one of 
Mr. FROTHINGHAM's sermons, and found that here was a 
man who taught liberty of thought, who at least gave me 
the liberty to think as I chose. 

Now, I have seen in newspapers lately — among others in 
a very respectable newspaper over the Hudson river, in 
Newark — the statement that Mr. FROTHINGHAM's mission 
here has been, to a certain extent, a failure ; that he has 
founded no sect — a point upon which Mr. Higginson has so 
admirably touched — that he has made few followers, and 
that he has given up his work in despair. If Mr. FROTH- 
INGHAM had done nothing by his teaching here for the last 
twenty years, except to grow as he has grown, to teach him- 
self as he has, to rise where he is now, he would have done 
a great work ; but in looking at this audience, — seeing the 
faces before me, realizing what these people have listened 



E. C. STEDMAN. 45 

to, observing the quality of the friends Mr. FROTHINGHAM 
leaves behind him, I feel that his work here has not been 
lost. The cause of free thought in this city is in just the 
same condition, to borrow a current metaphor, with the 
cause of specie payment and the condition of business pros- 
perity six months ago in this country. Financial strength 
was here, had been here for years, and we knew it not. I 
believe that we are just on the edge of a general establish- 
ment of religious freedom, and that the people of this city 
will be more indebted for it to Mr. FROTHINGHAM than 
to any other man. 

Mr. Higginson said something in relation to the excep- 
tional position of Mr. FROTHINGHAM, as a man who was 
conservative by nature, but radical through conviction. I 
thought that was the keenest, the most delicate, the best 
point made to-night. Many have done wisely, but thou ex- 
cellest them all. 

Mr. Kinney told me that he once said to Mr. Greeley, 
" Do you know what Charles King's opinion of you is 
— what he considers your chief characteristic?" Mr. 
Greeley said : " Well, I don't know. What does Charles 
say?" "He says Mr. Greeley, that your chief characteristic 
is hatred of a gentleman." Mr. Greeley scratched his head 
and said : " Well, Charles is about right. Gentlemen are 
generally oppressors of the poor, and I guess I do hate 
them." Now that is not the kind of gentlemen that we 
have in mind. It is true that Mr. FROTHINGHAM is a man 
who, by early training, and by descent loves a church, loves 
a cowl ; he likes that which is old and venerable and beauti- 
ful, that which is built by the hands of artistic and cultured 
men, and over which time has run its ivy. Such is his na- 
ture. But he is radical by conviction, and he says that the 



46 THE FROTHINGHAM -RECEPTION. 

truest and most lasting beauty, the beauty of the future, is 
that which must be founded on truth. And he has been 
able to lead many to share this conviction with him, among 
whom I count myself one of the humblest. 

We sit here by the gates of the ocean ; we are constantly 
called upon to salute those who pass beyond. Mr. FROTH- 
INGHAM has trained our heads, and he also has touched our 
hearts. To-night it is a question not merely of culture or 
conviction, but one of feeling. We love our pastor. We 
are glad he is going to have a rest. W^e know that he won't 
stay long ; that he can't stay long ; that in a very short time 
the old impulse will come over him ; he will smell the battle 
afar off, and cry, " Aha ! aha ! " and will be back among us 
refreshed and eager for a continuance of his work. 

The Chairman. Having succeeded, with your kindly aid, 
ladies and gentlemen, in drawing out our own poet, let me 
now hope for a brief speech from that friend of humanity, 
that noble younger brother of the revered poet of Cam- 
bridge — himself a poet and a preacher — the Rev. Samuel 
Longfellow. 

Mr. Longfellow thereupon came forward, and spoke 
as follows : I see it in your eyes, friends, that when the 
chairman began yet again his string of ingeniously varied 
complimentary epithets, you did not guess, until he men- 
tioned the name, that I was the one to be called upon to 
address you. I am disposed to make my speech in the lan- 
guage of that " double " of the story to which Mr. Chad- 
wick alluded, who was instructed to say, whenever called 
upon to speak at a public meeting, " Mr. Chairman, so much 
has already been said, and on the whole so well said, that I 
will not detain you by adding anything more ; " and as long 



SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 47 

as he kept his head he continued to make that speech, and 
then sat down. I shall not detain you much longer. 

I should like in the fitting time and place and presence to 
speak also those praises of Mr. FROTHINGHAM, which I 
could so heartily and sincerely speak, but it seems to me 
that if he did not need to go to Europe for rest yesterday 
he must need it to-night. 

I have not learned the art which seems to have been su£- 
gested to the previous speakers by the locality — that art of 
the stage " aside" — wherein remarks made by the voice 
perfectly audible to all before the speaker, are supposed 
to be inaudible to the hero on the stage. Pardon me, then, 
if I simply add that when I met Mr. FROTHINGHAM in the 
ante-room I heartily congratulated him that he was going 
to have a good vacation — a real period of rest. For no 
man has better earned it than he, after twenty years of con- 
tinued and uninterrupted labor, and with such a prodigious 
power of work as he has. New York will not seem the 
same place to many of us when he is away. Those of us 
who have not been in the habit of seeing him often have 
always been glad to know that he was here, standing up for 
freedom and truth. We shall be glad when he stands here 
again on the same errand. 

But what are you going to do now in these two years ? 
What can you do but try to live up to what for twenty 
years Mr. FROTHINGHAM has been preaching to you ? 
Perhaps it will take you all of the two years to do that 
thoroughly; to live out that religion which he has from 
Sunday to Sunday presented to you, and which you have, 
I believe, so heartily, so appreciatingly received ; a religion 
free alike from superstition and from irreverence; a religion 
at one with liberty, at one with nature, at one with science, 



48 THE FROTH INGHAM RECEPTION. 

at one with good morals, at one with reason, at one with all 
the higher and best feelings of the human heart. 

The Chairman. We must have a few words now, I think, 
from the scion of a good old anti-slavery stock, the Rev. 
Joseph May, of Philadelphia. 

Mr. May spoke as follows : Mr. Chairman, I was hoping, 
when you began to speak of your inability to carry out 
your programme, that there was coming a relief for some 
of us " young fellows" who are down towards the end of it. 

I have, however, learned one lesson, as I have sat here 
this evening, which I ought to be glad to communicate, if 
only for its possible bearing upon that question of the 
currency of the country, which has occupied so much of the 
popular attention. It is, sir, that those paper " notes," 
which have been spoken of, become rapidly depreciated, 
their value diminishing in exact proportion to the number 
of speakers who have preceded one — so that the sooner we 
pay our debts, Mr. Chairman, the better ; which I take to 
be good radical, as well as good Unitarian doctrine, both 
here and elsewhere. Mr. Curtis, with the art of a practiced 
speaker, seized at once upon an illustration which was burn- 
ing in the pockets of us all, in regard to Mr. FROTHING- 
HAM's (good man that he is!) " going to Paris;" and from 
him down to the last speaker something has been stripped 
from the memoranda which I laboriously prepared this 
afternoon, until my actual speech is perforce wholly extem- 
poraneous ; it has that merit, at least. 

It would hardly be kind for me to add anything more to 
the heap of laurels under which Mr. FROTHINGHAM must 
already feel himself to be struggling. I should hardly be 
fitted or able to do it. The only office which I can dis_ 



JOSEPH MA Y. 49 

charge on this occasion is to utter a kind expression of sym- 
pathy with you, and of regard for your pastor, in behalf of 
a body which I may assume to represent, and with which 
you must be, as well as Mr. FROTHINGHAM, at least on that 
conservative side of him which has been spoken of, in some 
degree of sympathy. I mean that Unitarian body from 
whom it has been a grief to many of us that your pastor 
should have felt it incumbent on him, in the form of his 
public position, to separate himself. That the principles on 
which Mr. FROTHINGHAM has based his ministry among 
you are those on which the Unitarian body is founded has 
certainly been indicated to-night in the references which 
have been made to the character and principles of its great 
leader, Dr. Channing. And if it be that these principles, 
operating upon the minds of some of your pastor's brother 
students of truth in the Unitarian denomination, have 
brought them to different positions from his in opinion, I 
am sure I can say from the body of them that they have 
had nothing but regret for the outward division, while there 
has been an impossibility of separating them in the spirit. 
I am sure I may say to-night that this is the first occasion 
on which the Unitarian clergy or laity will have been glad 
to have Mr. FROTHINGHAM go away from them. Possibly 
that which has been to-night noted as true of the progress 
of the age, of the progress of thought, will persuade Mr. 
FROTHINGHAM during his sojourn in Europe that we who 
still stick to the Unitarian name in a more or less loose and 
easy fashion, are, after all, pretty well along to where he 
has been ; and since it is but a difference of opinion which 
has differentiated his position from ours, I earnestly trust 
that wjien he comes back to America he may find it possible 
to come back also to the Unitarian fold, bringing you with 



50 THE FRO THINGHA M RECEPTION. 

him. So many of us have been, for many a year, halting 
about our " position," and troubled what to call it, I have 
come to the conclusion that the Unitarian body has such in- 
definite limits that it can easily include whosoever chooses 
to stay in it. As Mr. FROTHINGHAM sets sail in pursuit of 
rest and pleasure, the most cordial congratulations on his 
past services, and best wishes for his future health and work 
will go with him from us Unitarians all. 

If I may be more particular, Mr. Chairman, I represent 
here the oldest Unitarian Church, organized as such, in 
America. Its only minister before myself was, through his 
long pastorate, more than suspected of radical proclivities, 
and in its congregation I feel sure (and it does not trouble 
me) that your pastor has, besides personal friends, many in- 
tellectual sympathizers. For all these I will add a cordial 
word of congratulation to Mr. FROTHINGHAM at this im- 
pressive time. I think also I may venture to say that I 
speak for a great community. The peculiar doctrine of 
Quakerism was that of the inner light. Was not this al- 
most identical with that which has been the most charac- 
teristic doctrine of our radical school — the doctrine of the 
imminence of God in the soul of man? Among the mil- 
lion inhabitants of Philadelphia there must, then, be very 
many whose conscious or unconscious sympathy should be 
uttered here to-night. For them, for the Unitarian body, 
for my own congregation, for my beloved predecessor in 
the ministry and for myself, I offer Mr. FROTHINGHAM the 
heartiest congratulations and the kindliest good-bye. 

The Chairman. I have a number of letters from distin- 
guished persons who have desired to be present, hpt who 
have been compelled to express their regards and regrets in 



LE TTERS. 5 I 

writing. [The chairman then read the following letters 
from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles G. Ames, William 
Lloyd Garrison, Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Rip- 
ley. Owing to the lateness of the hour, the other letters 
received, and which are printed beneath, were not read.] 



LETTERS. 

Concord, Mass., April \ 6th. 

Dear Sir : 

I have received your letter arriving this morning and not 
the foregoing one of which it speaks. I grieve not to obey your 
kind invitation. I am not in condition to make visits or take any 
part in conversation. Old age has rushed on me in the last year 
and tied my tongue and hid my memory, and thus made it a duty 
to stay at home. I regret it the more that Mr. Frothingham has 
strong claims on me, not only on his own, but on his father's side, 
who was a noble friend to my youth. I rejoice that after so long 
and faithful labors in the church, he has still well-earned rest and 
enjoyment before him. With great regret that I must send no bet- 
ter reply. 

R. Waldo Emerson. 

J. H. Morse, Esq. 



Boston, April 19, 1879. 

Dear Mr. Morse : 

For the official invitation extended to me to be present 
at the Social Reception to be given in honor of Mr. Frothing- 
ham on the evening of the 22d inst., I return my thanks, with an 
expression of sincere regret that I am obliged to forego the pleas- 
ure which the occasion cannot fail to furnish all who may be in at- 
tendance. 

Mr. Frothingham has distinguished himself not only for his 
literary ability and scholarly attainments, but conspicuously as an 



52 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RECEPTION. 

independent outspoken thinker in the arena of theological investi- 
gation, and a courageous expounder of religious and ethical doc- 
trines, at the cost of being proscribed as a heretic ; neither reck- 
lessly nor egotistically antagonizing the popular sentiment of the 
day, but uttering his deepest convictions as to where the line runs 
betweeen reason and superstition, simple truth and dogmatic as- 
sumption, genuine inspiration and apocryphal resemblance. His 
printed discourses indicate the pains-taking student, the philoso- 
phic investigator, the fearless non-conformist, the broadly Catholic 
teacher ; and, however widely dissenting from some of the views 
they inculcate, every candid mind must admit the felicity of their 
diction, and the many admirable thoughts and sentiments con- 
tained in them. 

Mr. Frothingham has been versatile, abundant and long con- 
tinued in his ministrations ; and the consequence is impaired 
health, which imperatively demands relaxation, and which it is to 
be hoped will be fully restored by the transatlantic tour he has in 
contemplation. The best wishes of a troop of friends will attend 
him. 

Yours cordially, 

Wm. Lloyd Garrison. 

J. H. Morse, Esq. 



661 Fifth Avenue, April 21, 1879. 

Mr. J. H. Morse, Chairman. 

My Dear Sir : 
I greatly regret to find that I shall be prevented by the 
state of my health from attending the reception to Mr. Froth- 
ingham this evening. But I cannot allow the opportunity to pass 
without expressing my respect and admiration for the pastor, and 
my cordial interest in the occasion which is intended to do honor 
to his character and services. 

The work of Mr. Frothingham has been in accordance with 
the spirit of the age, and has been called forth by one of its special 



LETTERS. 



5 3 



demands. Within the last half century, and more notably within 
the last twenty-five years, the progress of liberal inquiry and scien- 
tific research has weakened, if not destroyed in many minds, the 
basis for a life of ideal aims and disinterested purposes. The reign 
of speculative dogma, though it has not entirely passed away, has 
been greatly impaired and thus the pillars of our existing civiliza- 
tion have been rudely shaken. 

The poets of the age have stood in the gap. Tennyson, Mrs. 
Browning, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, our beloved 
Bayard Taylor — (I can speak of him under no other name), have 
done much to hold up the standard of an ideal life in pure and 
beautiful colors. Many a youthful spirit has been quickened to a 
high consecration by the song of the poets, and been inspired with 
devotion to "whatsoever things are lovely, and true, and of good 
report." I have never heard that a young man has been led to 
forget the dreams of his youth by the stud)' of these writings ; I 
have never known that any man has been made a worse hus- 
band or father, or less valuable member of society by their in- 
fluence over his mind ; on the contrary, the respectable sinners 
who have made such havoc with the faith of the public, and the 
property of the widows and fatherless, have been generally men 
who were the enemies of the noblest ideas, and were always ready 
to denounce Emerson as an infidel, Longfellow as a Sadducee, and 
Frothingham as a subtle conspirator against the traditions of 
ages. 

Now, the work of our friend has been in the same line of direc- 
tion with the poets and men of genius who have shed a healing 
light over the darksome path of so many struggling souls, announc- 
ing a faith in the spirit where faith in the dogma had died a 
natural death, and gathering around him a band of pure-minded 
and devoted men and women, who, if they have not clung to the 
lights of the ancient world, have been made by his teachings more 
loyal to the belief in humanity, to spiritual ideas, to the faith that 



54 



THE FR 0 THINGHA M RECEPTION. 



works by love, to the charity that never fails, to the hope that 
flourishes in immortal youth. 

This has been the mission of the beloved pastor in sympathy 
with whom so many tried and trusted friends are here to-night, 
and how he has performed that mission your own hearts will tes- 
tify better than my inadequate words. I need not in your presence 
refer to the signal ability, the richness of resource, the manly free- 
dom, the persuasive eloquence, the earnestness, and propriety and 
delicacy, and power with which he has performed the duties of his 
high office, and made full proof of his ministry. Your best wishes 
that his future may be like his past cannot exceed the ardor and 
sincerity of my own. 

T remain ever faithfully yours, 

George Ripley. 



Boston, April 2, 1879. 

My Dear Sir : 

I honor Mr. Frothingham for his courage, and long 
devotion to the cause which you fitly call " the Religion of 
Humanity." I wish I could be at the meeting when his friends 
are to bid him farewell for the present, in the hope of seeing him 
after the rest he has so well earned, as many months or years 
younger in health and strength as he will be older by the calendar. 

But my duties command my presence in Boston at the time you 
mention, and I shall have to deny myself the pleasure of taking 
part in the interchanges of kind feeling and listening to the 
eloquent friends who will render any speech of mine unnecessary, 
and will lose nothing by my absence but a devout listener. 

Believe me dear Sir, 

Very truly yours, 

O. W. Holmes. 

To the Hon. Frank Fuller, 



LETTERS. 55 

Office of The Christian Register. 
Boston, Match 29, 1879. 

Dear Mr. Putnam : 

It is ever so good in your committee, or yourself, to 
beckon me to Mr. Frothingham's hail and farewell meeting, and 
I shall certainly come — only all the time this muddy vesture of de- 
cay must stay here ! If I were able to make my voice heard above 
the happy hum which I trust will resound in the Union League 
Theatre, there would be one more hearty word of personal regard 
for the going minister, one hearty prayer for his coming again 
with power and glory, and one cordial salute to all in every place 
who toil for the supremacy of The True, the Beautiful and the 
Good. 

In all cases yours, 

Chas. G. Ames. 

To G. H. Putnam, Esq. 

North Andover, Mass., April 11, 1879. 

Gentlemen : 

I thank you for inviting me to attend the social reception 
in honor of my friend Mr. Frothingham. I shall be unable to 
do so, otherwise than in the hearty expression by letter of my 
sympathies with the occasion and my best wishes for him and for 
you. 

It is eminently fitting to bear witness to the uninterrupted de- 
votion of his rare powers for twenty-five years in the service of 
that Universal Religion, into whose larger liberty and light we 
believe all past faiths and holy names must fade. Constantly 
spending his best thought and faith, battling in the open breach, 
and in punctual performance almost unaided save by your up- 
holding sympathy, he has earned what will go with him as a 
benediction, the gratitude of thousands, whose minds he has 
stirred into new birth, to whose spiritual nature he has disclosed 
paths of becoming culture, and whose hearts he has widened into 
the open communion of nature, science and humanity. 



5 6 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TIOX. 

As one whose friendship with your minister dates from the 
beginning of labors in which we have together seen such changes 
in the public mind as few equal periods of time have effected, 
allow me to enter my praise of the moral loyalty and intellectual 
aspiration which you desire to honor. They have not deepened 
through the tests of his ministry so much as proved that they did 
not need to do so ; and they have maintained their first simplicity 
through all the noble resources which he has gathered into their 
service, and the wide fields of reform in which he has shown him- 
self a master. His catholicity towards the thought of other times 
and other men, his constructive treatment of past history and 
present struggles, are justifying the claim of our " Radicalism" to 
renew the life of man from the roots upwards, by the attractions 
of a nobler springtime in the sky. 

Let me say that although some depressing circumstances must 
attend this severance from a sphere so long identified with his 
best life, yet this is surely an occasion to justify the grand rule of 
the Stoic, " All things are fruit to me, O Nature ! which thy 
seasons bring." The coming opportunities are as great as the 
past and as bravely earned. And we shall look with confidence 
to greet our friend, returning full freighted with fresh stores, that 
he will know well how to turn into harvests for all. 

Very truly yours, 

Samuel Johnson. 

To J. H. Morse and others, 

Committee. 



50 West 47th Street, April 18, 1879. 

My Dear Mr. Morse : 

I am sorry to find, as I told you I more than half 
expected, that my business engagements will prevent my attend- 
ing your social festival next week in honor of Mr. Frothingham, 
and must therefore with regret decline the invitation you were so 
kind as to send me. But I shall take another opportunity to say 



LETTERS. 57 

Good-bye to Mr. Frothingham, and I beg you to accept my best 
wishes for the success of the occasion. 

Most truly yours ; 

Joseph H. Choate. 

J. H. Morse, Esq. 



New Bedford, Mass., May 5, 1879. 

Mr. J. H. Morse : 
Dear Sir. — 

In behalf of the Committee of Arrangements for the 
social reception given to Mr. Frothingham, you ask me to write 
out for your pamphlet report of the proceedings on that occasion, 
the substance of what I might have said there, had time per- 
mitted the carrying out of the complete programme of addresses. 
I am very willing to do this so far as I am now able to recall what 
was in my mind to say, for I have no prepared notes to help my 
memory. But my chief point was to speak of Mr. Frothing- 
ham's services in connection with the Free Religious Association 
and movement ; and I am grateful for the opportunity to put on 
record the testimony I might have borne to the high value of his 
labors in this direction — the more grateful since it so happened 
that none of the speakers specially alluded to this part of his 
work. 

I could and did most heartily endorse all that was said in the 
spoken addresses, of the rare power of Mr. Frothingham's min- 
istry, both by voice and pen, in behalf of liberal, national and 
humane religion ; and I might have added some words to express 
my own personal indebtedness to him, in ways that he knows 
nothing of, for what he has said and done in his career as preach- 
er. To say, as some of the newspaper critics are saying, that 
such a ministry is a failure because he leaves no church behind 
him and no voice during his absence is to be heard in his place, 
evinces but a shallow knowledge of the methods and extent of the 
influence which goes out from such a life-work. 



5 8 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

But it was as fellow-officers of the Free Religious Association 
that Mr. Frothingham and myself were brought most intimately 
together. For eleven consecutive years we stood in that organi- 
zation side by side, he as President and I as Secretary ; and hence 
no other person, perhaps, is better qualified than myself to testify 
to his fidelity and devotion to that movement. During all these 
years, in our official and in our personal relationship, both in mat- 
ters of counsel and in affairs of administration, there has been un- 
broken harmony between us. The Free Religious Association 
was first suggested in a circle of younger men ; but he was among 
the earliest to give a cordial reception to the idea. It was my lot 
first to carry the suggestion to him and to talk with him over the 
inchoate hopes and plans. He entered at once into hearty sym- 
pathy with the movement ; saw, as we all did, the difficulties to be 
surmounted, but justly appreciated also the need and the oppor- 
tunity ; and from that time he became one of the foremost in the 
preliminary consultations and arrangements. When it was de- 
termined to commit the movement to a public meeting, and he con- 
sented to serve as chairman of the first public committee, and then 
as President of the Association, we felt that with his abilities and 
reputation thus placed at the head, the standing and success of the 
new organization were in a-great measure already assured. 

His faithfulness in serving the Association as its President 
from the time of that first public meeting in 1867 until he felt con- 
strained last year to resign the post, is now largely a matter of pub- 
lic record. But it may be well to remember some of the details 
here. His firmness, grace and tact as a presiding officer were re- 
markable and gave a special character to our conventions. Dur- 
ing the term of his presidency he attended and presided at every 
annual meeting of the Association in Boston, and also at all the 
conventions (excepting one) held by the Association in the au- 
tumn or early winter in other parts of the country. In some years 
two or three of these conventions have been held in distant cities, 



LETTERS. 59 

involving a good deal of fatigue by travel and speaking, and some 
experiences not a little distasteful to his temperament. But, 
though he sometimes doubted whether these conventions did 
enough good to pay for all they cost, when the time came for an- 
other he was ready for the self-sacrifice and the labor. In these 
conventions he always spoke at length at the opening session, un- 
folding the principles and aims of the Free Religious movement. 
His briefer introductory addresses at the annual meetings, couched 
in his vigorous and elegant diction, and his graceful remarks in- 
troducing the speakers and closing the sessions, are preserved in 
the printed Annual Reports of the Association and are among the 
gems of free religious literature. One of these opening addresses? 
that for 1870, is more elaborate than usual, and may be here re- 
ferred to as perhaps the most complete statement of his idea of 
Free Religion which Mr. Frothingham has anywhere put into 
print. For a number of years, too, he opened regularly on the 
first Sunday of January a series of lectures given under the aus- 
pices of the Association in Boston, and on those occasions first 
presented to the public some of his finest contributions to religious 
thought and discussion. 

For more than half of the time, therefore, that Mr. Frothing- 
ham has been your minister in New York, he has stood before the 
country as the chief executive officer of the national Free Relig- 
ious Association and the most conspicuous exponent of its ideas 
and spirit. That the members of that Association have been 
proud of their President and are very grateful to him, seems a 
small thing to say in view of such services as he has rendered. I 
know that very many of them believe that such success as the As- 
sociation has had in winning public'attention and respect, has been 
largely owing to his eloquent and cultured advocacy. By his 
spoken and printed word he has addressed a great multitude of 
people throughout the couutry, who now join their eager desires 
to yours of his society in New York, that he may be speedily re- 



6o 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



cruited by this season of rest, and to come back again to be your 
minister and theirs. 

M ost sincerely yours, 

Wm. J. Potter. 



The Chairman. The lateness of the hour admonishes me 
that I must call upon the last speaker of the evening. Si- 
lence will be golden after the silver speech of our honored 
friend and pastor the Rev. O. B. FROTHINGHAM. 

Mr. FROTHINGHAM on coming forward was greeted with 
enthusiastic and long continued applause, the gentlemen on 
the platform and the whole audience rising. 

Mr. FROTHINGHAM then spoke as follows: Can any- 
body tell me who I am ? If I believed, or could be- 
lieve half what my kind friends here have in all sincerity 
and heartiness been saying, I should incur the displeasure 
of the great apostle who said, " If a man think himself to 
be something when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself." 
Fortunately, during a serious and thoughtful life I have 
practised severely the art of self scrutiny, and humbly think 
I know myself better than even these very noble and sym- 
pathetic friends who judge me after all from the outside, 
and I assure you, dear friends, that I am morally safe against 
the kindest things that can be said of me or to me. Who 
can look back on a ministry of twenty years, and not see 
many things that he would wish to change, spots he would 
be glad to erase ; deficiencies he would be thankful to re- 
pair, blunders he would wish to correct? It is a long story 
of back-sliding, timidity, imperfection of purpose, substitu- 
tion of impulse for judgment ; a long story with which I will 
not burden you or sadden myself. Others may know what 



O. B. FKOTHINGIIAM. 



61 



he has tried to do ; what he has left undone or tried to ac- 
complish, he alone can tell, and he tells it to nobody. 

With my audience and with myself, I have simply tried 
to be honest. If I had been endowed with the graceful 
persuasiveness of my friend Curtis, or the heroic courage of 
my friend Higginson, or the sweet reasonableness of my 
friend Potter, or the steadfastness and clearness of my friend 
Adler, or the joyousness of heart of my friend Chadwick, I 
should have done better, — so much better; — so much better! 
But I was only myself, had only my own temperament, my 
own circumstance, my own small modicum of ability; and if 
the weapon I was forced to use sometimes bent and broke 
in my hand, wounding me more than my opponent, perhaps 
the fault is not wholly chargeable to myself. Mine has 
been a career of conflict, where hard words had to be heard 
and spoken, and heavy blows dealt as well as received ; and 
if sometimes there was a stronger smell of sulphur in the 
air than of the fragrance of roses, it was not as I would have 
had it. 

Let me not however, dwell on this. I do not suppose 
that all these dear and noble friends have come together to 
pay tribute to me, or to what I have done, for that is noth- 
ing ; but there are certain things which are worthy of any 
tribute — of the best tribute of the best people, achievements 
with which I have been fortunately associated, and to which 
is due any reputation that may cling to me. How much 
has been gained in the twenty years of my ministry in New 
York, — how much of value so inestimable that it can never 
be spoken ; how much of liberty in the privilege of fine 
speech, fine thought, fine action ! The change in public 
sentiment has been great in all the centres of influence. In 
the small places outside the great cities — perhaps there is 



62 



THE FROTHINGHAM RECEPTION. 



not so much of this peculiar quality manifest ; but in the 
powerful centres of mind, liberty of thinking on the subjects 
of religion is now effectually guaranteed. A man may go to 
whatever church he pleases, or to none at all ; may recite 
what creed he approves, or none whatever ; if he is an earn- 
est, honest, sincere man (and he should not be respected if 
he is less than this), he is honored, whatever his ecclesiastical 
connection, whatever his dogmatical system. This is an 
enormous gain. There are men — some of the best men that 
it is my privilege to know — who never darkened the doors 
of a church, who cannot intelligibly tell what they believe, 
who never make a confession of faith even to their own 
hearts, who never put up official prayer. Yet they are looked 
upon with something like veneration for the manhood that 
they reveal. We have gained so much as this; — that relig- 
ion now, in the centres of life, means character, conduct, 
principle, earnestness, sincerity of purpose, vital reality of 
thought and sentiment. 

It is little that any individual has done toward this — little 
that any party or sect may have done ; the age has accom- 
plished it. It is the spirit of our time to be undogmatic. 
It is not American only ; it is English, it is German, it is 
French, Italian, Spanish. The gospel of freedom has its 
representative men, and its resounding voices in every civil- 
ized land to-day. The individual reformer is a result — an 
effect quite as much as a cause ; a creator of his period. 
We are still pausing at the threshold of the spring praying 
the genial season would come. It will come, necessarily, 
with the penetrating sunbeam. Give us the sunbeam for a 
few days and all is green again ; the air is soft, the trees 
laugh with their leaves, the birds recover the tunefulness of 
their voices, and all the world is glad. When the sunbeam 



O. B. FROTH IX GUAM. 



63 



comes! But the sunbeam comes as the effect of the revolu- 
tion of the planet, it is a result quite as much as it is a cause. 
As my sweet souled friend Longfellow has so well voiced it, 
in the hymn that we have loved to sing in our halls: 

Out of the dark the circling sphere ( 

Is rounding onward to the light. 
We see not yet the full day here, 

But we do see the paling night ; 

And Hope that lights her fadeless fires, 

And Faith that shines a heavenly will, 
And Love that courage reinspires, 

These stars have been above us still. 

This confidence in inevitable truth is a great gain. 

There is another gain incidental to this which only the 
workers in this great and noble cause are fully conscious of. 
It is that we have reached a point now of intellectual compos- 
ure, of mental calm and justice, of spiritual equilibrium. The 
age of polemics, the bitter age of controversy is passing by. 
We do not now assail beliefs ; we interpret them, we do not 
abhor, we understand them ; we classify instead of refuting ; 
Ave place doctrines where they belong, enabling them to re- 
port themselves. We do not call ourselves the enemy of 
any dogmatical system, but the truest friends, rather, because 
we believe that we have attained a point from which we may 
interpret every system from the inside, and thus do it abso- 
lute justice. One of the most sturdy combatants of the old 
orthodox system now living and writing is John Morley 
of London. What is his method? He flings down the 
gauntlet before orthodox theology, with a determination 
that makes it ring throughout Christendom. What does he 
in substance say? Not ' I hate, I detest, I oppose, I will 
pull down ; ' but rather, ' Gentlemen, we challenge you to a 
race for the prize of life ; — not to a conflict, not to a strug- 



64 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

gle of arms, but to a noble emulation of ideas. Let us see 
which will do the most for humanity. Here are the vexa- 
tious problems that try all our souls, the problem of wealth 
and poverty, the problem of labor and capital, the problem 
of law and liberty, the problem of communism, of socialism, 
these problems are before us all ; let us see who offers the 
best solution. I say science, philosophy, reason ; I say art, 
literature, general progress of mankind ; you say theology. 
Let us try. We shall distance you ; we shall not assail you, 
we shall classify you, and only so condemn you ; we shall 
leave you behind, and we shall do it because we shall achieve 
a work which it is not in you to perform.' This is the spirit 
in which modern faith comes forward to meet the faith of 
other days, not with slogan and war cry, not with the flour- 
ish of weapons, but with the still small voice of reason. In 
the noble spirit of emulation, it calls upon men to do some- 
thing, to show them what they can accomplish, proving 
their faith by their works. This is a great thing. The radi- 
cal now is calm, self-possessed, rational, he has no disposi- 
tion to go backward ; he is not becoming reactionary, he 
is not lapsing into an unthinking conservatism. He has no 
more respect for the old systems than he had before, but he 
does not caricature or misrepresent them, he treats them 
with intelligence ; he is able to do them ample justice. He 
says to the Roman Catholic, to the Buddhist, to the 
Brahmin, to any one ehe, ' I understand you, your history 
is before me, your thought is manifest. Come forward, I 
take you by the hand. You are a servant of the same 
humanity of which I am a servant. Let us see how, with 
our separate methods, we can work together to do the 
one work which no single one of us can do alone.' 

This spirit of humanity — this is the last great gain which r 



0. B. FR 0 THING HA M. 65 

it seems to me, has come to us with liberty. The vital 
thing with every church is to do something good for the 
world — to address itself hopefully to vital problems. The 
Society for Ethical Culture in New York establishes and 
conducts a Kindergarten for poor children, institutes a 
workingman's lyceum, and offers lectures weekly during the 
winter by able men, who speak to the working people di- 
rectly, as man speaks to man. That is the way we begin ; 
that is the way that every living society endeavors to justify 
itself in this generation. All churches now are coming to 
be churches of humanity ; every society now is a society of 
humanity ; the evangelicals are now coming forward to show 
what they can do to make the world better; and the charm 
of it is that orthodox men, distinguished for learning, ability, 
grace and authority, are adopting scientific methods, are con- 
trolling the practical wisdom of men of the world to know 
what is the best way of dealing with the money question, the 
pauper question, the communist question, the social question 
in all its forms; they are adopting that method that works, in 
place of the method of tradition. This is the hopeful side of 
the situation, that in spite of themselves the spirit of the age, 
the spirit of liberty, of reason, of humanity is possessing 
churches — not ours only — not the liberal churches alone, but 
the Catholic, the Protestant, the Evangelical — we are all be- 
ginning to work together. A fine spirit of love, a noble 
soul of justice, a spirit of brotherhood is catching from soul 
to soul, jumping over the differences of faith and sect, and 
touching with light all earnest spirits, let them call them- 
selves by whatever name they may. 

This is the sign of the new dispensation. I see it. I am 
grateful to acknowledge it. Little as I may have done to 
bring it in, it is the vision of its coming that has kept me 



66 THE FR 0 THINGHA M RE CEP TION. 

at work so long, and will keep me at work as long as I live. 
For it is not in the nature of things that a man with a liv- 
ing heart in his bosom, or a living conscience, or a soul sus- 
ceptible of being kindled by great ideas and sublime pur- 
poses — I say it is not in the nature of things that a man 
thus looking toward the future can travel away with flying 
colors and spend idle years in Europe. It is America that 
calls for us all, and it is America that shall have the last 
drop that warms my heart. 

Dear friends, good friends, some of you old friends tried 
in fires of adversity, some of you new friends, who would 
be true if the hour of adversity called upon you, all friends 
to-night in a common sympathy and a common purpose, 
I should be more than insensible if I could help being 
deeply touched by this reception. If in these twenty years 
I have done anything to lighten any burden, to smooth any 
path, to comfort any spirit, no one should be so grateful for 
that as I. But if any of you think I have done anything 
so good as this, remember it is not I that have done it, but 
those solemn, eternal forces that work upon us, around us 
and through us, which have condescended to use me as their 
instrument. 



T WEN TV YEARS 



0 F A N 



INDEPENDENT MINIS TR Y 



PRAYER. 



INFINITE Spirit, for whom we have no name, of whom 
we have no adequate thought, and whose light plays all 
around us, and whose perpetual witness is in every man's 
heart, the strength of all righteous purpose, the light 
of all our seeing, the power of all our hope, we bow our 
heart before thee, we open our hearts to thee, we ask for 
thy light in our mind, for thy strength in our spirit. As we 
stand on the brink of the flood of years and look backward, 
may our memories be pure and noble and sweet, memories 
of hours of peaceful meditation and loft strenuous thought, 
hours of release from the care and trouble of the world, 
hours sometimes of answer to life's painful questions, hours 
of silence from passion and unrest and tribulation, hours of 
peace and hope and solace amid the world's struggle and 
defeat, hours when we have dreamed of a better life, of a 
world above this world, of a spirit within us stronger 
than temptation, stronger than error, stronger than evil. 

As we look back, may all memory of bitterness disappear, 
and may we believe more and more in the work of that 
great spirit of truth that guides men through their groping 
and stumbling and falling to a brighter light than they have 
dreamed of. And, as we look forward into the darkness 
of the unknown future, may we turn our faces thither- 



70 PR A YER. 

ward with confidence and hope, knowing that that living- 
power which has carried us along so far will carry us even 
to the end, with the same kindness and the same invincible 
love. In this hour we would remind ourselves once more 
of the deathless faith that we have tried to make clear, and 
to cherish faith in a living spirit that is not outside of the 
world, a creator, a judge, — but that is inside of the world 
and working in all its properties and operations, thinking 
in its thought, glowing in its beauty, pulsing in its nobler 
conscience and animating all that furthers the progress of 
mankind. 

Once more, we would take to heart the deep and 
earnest faith that the spirit that revives, refreshes and re- 
generates the world, is at all times in the world, and that 
it has its representatives in every conscience, in every true 
heart, in every living and faithful soul. We would once 
more renew our faith in the better powers of humanity that 
are within us all, powers that seek the light in the midst of 
superstition, credu ffty, error and darkness, that strive after 
the good amid all the bewilderments and conflicts of evil. 
Living as we do in a world of doubt and error and strife, 
where there are so many questions that cannot be answered, 
so many problems that cannot be solved, so much mystery 
that no knowledge or thought of ours can clear away, we 
would press to our hearts these deathless convictions. If we 
are old men and old women, we would look back and feel 
that a power greater than ours has been ordering our life 
for us. If we are young, with all life before us, its issues 
still open, its opportunities still unspent, we would look 
forward bravely and cheerfully, knowing that the Provi- 
dence that worketh all things uses us as instruments ; and, 
if we are strenuous workers in the world, immersed in its 



PR A YER. ■ 7 1 

business, tried with its cares, perplexed by its doubts, we 
would still believe that there is always victory for true men, 
for true women ; that nothing good comes to an untimely 
end ; and although the saintly ones seem to go out in dark- 
ness, yet their light burns and blazes forever. We would 
think of the poor, the helpless, the forlorn, the forsaken, 
the wandering, the distressed and the distracted. Are we 
not all children of the mysterious Power that governs and 
blesses the world ? May we live in faith, in trust, in obe- 
dience, till the time comes when our song of aspiration 
shall cease, and we shall swell the chorus of the perfect 
praise and love ! 



TWENTY YEARS 



OF AN 



INDEPENDENT MINISTRY. 



T the close of a term of a ministry of many years, it 



JTv. is appropriate that something should be said in re- 
gard to the principles on which that ministry has been con- 
ducted, the aims it has had before it, the purposes it has 
cherished and the ends it has sought to further. Twenty 
years ago this very month this society was established as a 
Unitarian society. The minister, however, belonged then, 
as he had belonged for many years before, to the more lib- 
eral branch of the Unitarian body. He had been and was 
a believer in the spiritual philosophy — was what was in New 
England called a Transcendentalist. He was of the school 
of Theodore Parker. He represented, therefore, the move- 
ment of the party, not its stationariness — its future, not its 
past. He believed in its best ideas ; he cherished its most 
enthusiastic hope; and he had faith in a future that was en- 
folded in its germs but was not unfolded in its actual condi- 
tion. He had always found fault with the theology of Uni- 
tarianism as being fluctuating, uncertain and vague. He 
had never rested in its final articles, had never supposed it 
possessed any final articles, had never presumed that it had 
uttered its word, but had always taken for granted that it 
was trying to utter its word; that it was clearing its mind 
and seeking for some distinct articulation that it had never 




74 0. B. FROTHINGHAM. 

found. Its theology seemed to him defective — fatally de- 
fective — and weak at almost every point. There was no 
article of it that was not in his view, and had not in his 
view long been subject to fatal criticism. That criticism 
he had made no secret of entertaining and applying. He 
was known as one of those who repudiated the spirit of sec- 
tarianism and who built simply upon ideas, who had faith 
in knowledge, in free thinking, and all of whose hope in 
modern Christianity consisted in largeness, loftiness and 
breadth of view. Thus he found fault with the Unitarian 
doctrine in respect to the unity of God. The Unitarians 
had discarded the doctrine of trinity, not always, as it seem- 
ed, and still seems, with absolute and entire wisdom ; but it 
had never arrived at a clear, compact, reasonable statement 
of any doctrine of divine unity. That God was numerically 
one and not numerically three, it had asserted until it was 
out of breath ; but that God was one, that there was but 
one spirit ruling, pervading and regenerating the world — a 
spirit of art, of beauty, of intelligence, of heroic will, of 
aspiration, of progress, had never been apprehended — but 
one spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, ever-present. Because 
Unitarianism had a faint fear or suspicion of the existence, 
somewhere, of a devil, who shared and divided the empire 
of the world and somehow cut across the divine purposes 
and baulked the supreme plans — a spirit of pure evil, a 
spirit of error, a spirit of iniquity, that was forever interpos- 
ing doubt and fear and obstruction in the irresistible path 
of progress, which had been feeling its way through ages 
and was destined in future to come out into perfect light. 
The Unitarianism of a generation ago never voiced itself 
clearly on this great article of the unity of God. We do 
not comprehend it now. Science is throwing light upon it ; 



A N INDEPENDEN T MINIS 7 R Y. / 5 

philosophy is helping us to interpret it ; the advance of the 
human mind is unfolding it, and we see its separate bear- 
ings. But it is only through imagination ;it is only through 
faith and hope that we can really rest in a doctrine'the 
deepest, the highest, the noblest, the sweetest that ever en- 
chanted or ever will enchant with its seraphic music the 
souls of the bravest thinkers and the most heroic workers 
of the race. 

Again, the Unitarian doctrine of the Christ seems entirely 
insufficient. That he was not God was asserted clearly 
enough ; that he was something less than deity was declared, 
— an archangel perhaps — the creator of the visible world — 
possibly a spiritual being of rank higher or lower ; and some 
very audacious minds dared to say that he was a man ! — but 
that was said with bated breath and always carefully distin- 
guished by those who said it, in the emphatic declaration 
that, when they said he was a man, they did not say that he 
was a mere man, that is to say, that he was a man in any 
intelligible, rational, or complete sense at all, that he was 
human. His humanity was put at such a distance from or- 
dinary humanity — from the highest humanity — the humanity 
of Plato, the humanity of Confucius, Buddha, or Socrates — 
and the highest peaks of humanity seemed so much like 
hills in his presence, that it was about as sensible to call him 
God at once and leave him there in his solitary heavens. 
For if the Christ be human, he is human according to our 
conception ; — not the perfect man, for that we cannot con- 
ceive of, — not the ideal man, for that we only think of in 
our dreams ; — not the possibility of man, for that is what 
the holiest souls hunger and thirst after in their hours of 
light and meditation and sweetness. When we say Christ 
is a man, we mean that he stands in the line of history, that 



76 O. B. FRO THINGHA M. 

he has a past, that he comes out of the bosom of his race, 
that the experiences of humanity were his; that, he knew 
what it was to doubt ; that he knew what it was to fall into 
error and mistake ; aye, that he could be touched with moral 
imperfection ; that his soul did not always rest in perfect 
serenity on the bosom of the great Father. This is involved 
in the idea that the Christ was human. But Unitarianism 
never said that, had not the courage to say it, did not see 
its way far enough to say it ; and, therefore it left its doc- 
trine of the Christ floating in the air midway between 
heaven and earth. They called him Saviour, Redeemer, In- 
tercessor, a Being somewhere above humanity, somewhere 
below deity. 

The doctrine of human nature also was equally unsatisfac- 
tory ; almost unnecessary pains were taken to say that man 
was not depraved, I say almost unnecessary, because it 
seems to me difficult to believe that any human being in his 
senses can believe so suicidal a doctrine as the total de- 
pravity of human nature. This doctrine was discredited, 
but the substantial healthiness of manhood and womanhood 
was not so clearly affirmed. Disparaging phrases were used 
in regard to mankind, the performances of mankind, and the 
experiences. A tone of complaint and penitence, sometimes 
almost of unseemly whining, was indulged in when speaking 
of the achievements of mankind. The business of the world 
was spoken of as if it was only half worthy. It was per- 
petually intimated that men could do nothing of the mag- 
nificent type without some supernatural help from beings 
who were outside of their common destiny. All this was 
rather discouraging ; at all events it was very perplexing 
and confusing, but it was incidental. 

It was the faith of the minister of this new congregation 



A IV INDEPENDEN T MINIS TR Y. 77 

that this vagueness would be put aside, would be outgrown, 
that the intellectual life of the denomination would clear it- 
self as it went on, and that, by and by, a definite and co- 
herent statement would be made in regard to all matters 
that concerned the religious life. Therefore, in perfect 
faith, in entire sincerity, without a surmise or a suspicion, 
he stood as a Unitarian, and his congregation was a Unita- 
rian congregation. 

But there came a time, and an evil time as it seemed to 
him then, and as it seems to him now, when Unitarianism 
determined to organize itself where it was — that is to say, 
to lay by the idea of an indefinite and expansive broad fu- 
ture, and close up its ranks and see what it could do as a 
sect among sects. In this attempt, though generously 
meant, inaugurated by the bravest and amplest minds, it 
was necessary that there should be an intellectual basis of 
creed — a theological basis — for no other was at that time 
possible — and statements were made which seemed to com- 
mit the denomination to certain tenets. From that point 
the duty of your minister seemed to be clear. It was to 
hold on in his own way, to work out his own thoughts, to 
separate himself from the denomination with which he had 
acted, and to stand alone. For the last ten years and more, 
this ministry has been a purely independent ministry, con- 
nected with no sect, associated with no denomination, but 
simply conditioned on the fidelity to the principles of free 
speech and free thought in all questions that concern reli- 
gion. 

The position of individualism came easy and natural to a 
man who had been an adherent of the spiritual philosophy, 
who was by profession of faith a Transcendentalist, who 
stood with Parker and with Emerson on grounds of pure 



7§ O. B. FROTHINGHAM. 

reason such as faith lends itself to. Individualism, in fact, 
is hardly consistent with anything else than individualism, 
for the holder of this faith believes that light comes to the 
individual mind, truth to the individual heart, rectitude to 
the individual conscience, and that it is through simplicity 
and sincerity, an utter devotion of life, that each single soul 
arrives at the glory of his own development. 

Emerson preached individualism. So did Parker. So 
did all the men of that school. It was the logical outcome 
of their faith ; the faith was very nearly associated with the 
Quaker doctrine of the inner life. It differed from that 
doctrine simply in this respect, that the Quaker doctrine 
rested on a basis of theological orthodoxy, while this rested 
on a basis of philosophical research. But that essential 
faith was faith in the individual soul, faith in reason, faith 
in the inspiration of the private heart. Institutions were 
disparaged. Systems of faith were set aside. Special 
dogmas were discarded. The spirit of dogmatism was 
made the subject of the most earnest protest. It was 
a very noble position — the noblest position that can be 
held ; and, so long as it could be held simply and sin- 
cerely and reasonably, with due loftiness of purpose, 
with humility and modesty and consecration, it was safe. 
It was a good principle. It was the only principle 
on which nobleness could proceed, and nothing but 
nobleness ever proceeded from it. Did anything but the 
supremest kind of nobleness ever come from Ralph Waldo 
Emerson? Did anything but nobleness of the most heroic 
kind, tender and sweet, ever come from Theodore Parker? 
No, nobody could say that it ever did. Was it not a Bap- 
tist preacher of Boston — a preacher of orthodoxy of a very 
intense evangelical sort to sailors, who, being asked one day 



A N INDEPENDEN I ' MINIS I 'R Y. / 9 

what would happen to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the future 
— was it not this man who said, " Well, I will not undertake 
to say. My creed forbids that he should go to heaven. 
Everything forbids that he should go to hell. For if he 
went there, there'Vould be no more hell : he would change 
the climate and emigration would set that way." So long 
as this spiritual philosophy could maintain its purity and 
sweetness and nobleness, individualism was safe — perfectly 
safe. Nothing but gentleness and sweetness and right could 
ever proceed from it. 

But the time comes when this noble position is held by 
fewer and fewer persons, when individualism becomes rough 
and rude and contumacious, when vagaries and whims and 
notions calling themselves inspired and a coarse kind of 
self-assertion take possession of the holy place, and utter 
their diatribe in the name of prophecy. Then individu- 
alism becomes questionable. Then a destructive process 
begins. Then institutions are assailed in an intemperate 
spirit. Then the great creeds of the world are assailed by 
vulgar hands, are pulled down in promiscuous ruins never 
to be built up again. 

Therefore, dear friends, it is given me this morning to say 
this, that in my judgment the era of dogmatic individualism 
is drawing near its close. The time will soon come, in my 
belief, when dependence will be placed not upon the indi- 
vidual speaker or the private teachings of one man, but 
when men and women will come together and consult for 
mutual advantage, when there will be a desire for an affilia- 
tion, a longing to organize, when another and nobler belief 
in institutions will be established, and new modes of faith 
will be sought and will be followed. It seems to me that 
we are on the eve now of organization, of construction on a 



8o 



O. B. FR 0 THINGHA M. 



new basis, under the guidance and direction and impulse of 
a new principle. It seems to me that the era of destruc- 
tion is ended, and that all noble and intelligent minds who 
believe in society, and hope for the welfare of society in the 
future, will help in this work of reconstruction. 

Now, where are we to look for the force that will recon- 
struct ? There is the Roman Catholic church — for Europe 
and England and America the greatest church that there is. 
When we think of the Roman Catholic church we think 
of the middle ages. We think of the violence, darkness, 
credulity, superstition, spiritual tyranny of a crushing sort. 
But the middle ages are passed, never to return. We live 
in the nineteenth century, in the midst of light and liberty, 
of a free press, free institutions, free speech, free thought, 
all the world conspiring to know more about the universe 
and about society. It is simply impossible that the Roman 
Catholic church — even if it should attain the ascendency 
that in my judgment it dreams of with futility — -would ever 
be what it was three hundred years ago. The men who 
administer its affairs are men of the nineteenth century. 
They read, they think, they have regard for the institutions 
and the civilization of the world they live in. Their church 
must have caught it, have been affected by it. 

The church is making immense conquests in England and 
in America. I do not fear them. I have no apprehensions. 
I am willing it should make them — all the conquests it law- 
fully can. Though I disbelieve in its speculative founda- 
tions through and through, though the principles upon 
which it is built are to me little short of detestable, still I 
can see the prevalence of that stir without a shudder, and 
I believe that the old fashion piety of the modern age — the 
passive piety, the piety of affliction will find refuge in that 



AN INDEPENDENT MINISTRY. 



8i 



old church. The spirit of babyhood that is in the larger 
part of mankind and womankind, the spirit that cries in the 
night, that gropes around for a friend, that trembles and 
shivers, that lacks self-reliance, that lacks courage and hope- 
fulness, the unintelligent spirit, the ignorant, cringing spirit, 
the spirit that skulks through the world as the scout goes 
through a hostile camp — this spirit which prevades mankind 
now to a very large extent will find refuge in that old 
church. Why? First, because it is an institution older than 
anything in the modern world — centuries old — a thousand 
years old — an institution covering leagues and leagues of 
territory, including people of all nationalities, of all tongues, 
compact, organized perfectly well and understanding itself, 
going by its own mechanism, going without being pushed. 
It never answers questions. It never opens questions. Its 
problems are all closed ; it stands and works and has a tre- 
mendous momentum of its own. It has its head, its officers, 
its priests, its altars, its sacraments, its temples, its rules. 
It is a form of social life. It is an organized charity. It 
has an organized business. It is an organized home. It is 
in fact, a form of civilization. That is a great thing. When 
a man joins the Roman Catholic church, he feels that he 
becomes a member of an enormous brotherhood. Calm, 
passive, unresisting, untroubled, it holds on its unswerving 
way, sees some go, sees others come, is never weary, is never 
flustered, understands itself, comprehends its position, does 
its work, and leaves undone the work that it does not feel 
called to do. This is the force of an institution. It is a 
prodigious force. There are worlds of people who cry out 
for authority, who want rest, who clamor for peace, who 
have a deep hunger in their souls for quiet — " No more tor- 
menting questions. I cannot understand the world. No- 



82 



O. B. FRO THING RAM. 



body understands the world. The old church has a declara- 
tion as good as any. Let us lean up against that ancient 
wall and feel that we are supported." This is the feeling 
that in the modern world and in modern parts of the mod- 
ern world draws scores, hundreds, thousands of people to- 
ward that ancient establishment. 

Again, it is an immense advantage that the Roman Cath- 
olic church has, that its creed is under ground. It is not 
thrust into people's faces all the time. They are not even 
required to believe it or to know what it is. We build our 
houses on solid foundations, but we do not feel the neces- 
sity every day, of going down cellar and employing masons 
to test the walls to see whether every stone is in its place. 
We live in the parlors, in the chambers. Our windows 
look out above ground, and we are satisfied with the foun- 
dations as long as the superstructure stands. So the Roman 
Catholic does not live among speculative questions, is not 
forever pulling up his harvests to see how they are growing. 
He takes it for granted that certain things are settled, that 
certain questions are answered, that certain problems are 
disposed of; and when people come into his church, they 
do not have to be catechised in regard to the shadows of 
meaning of each article and every single point of the creed. 
It is sufficient that they accept it, that they come in and 
use the establishment and enjoy it and get what they can 
out of it. That is an immense gain, because the number of 
people is very small who can intelligently raise questions. 
It requires almost as much mental ability to ask a question 
as it does to answer it. The Roman Catholic church has 
these questions answered and done with. You can belong 
to the church and go in and out of the doors and parlors and 
not know on what principle the superstructure was erected. 



A N IN DEPENDED ' T MINIS TR Y. 8 3 

And again, this ancient church has in modern society an 
immense advantage here, that it can use all kinds of people, 
can turn all men and all women to some sort of account — 
can set them all at work — the idle, the ignorant, the stupid, 
the finical, the enthusiastic, the visionary — there is some- 
thing for them all to do. They are happy, contented and 
harmless. The innovator, instead of going off and estab- 
lishing a different sect, is taken in and set to work and 
grinds the will of the universal church. So we see people 
who have nothing to do in the world, who are sure if they 
try to do anything, to do it wrong — we see those people 
going into the old church, quietly taken up, put in a very 
little niche and made bus}' and contented and pleased with 
themselves, and they do no harm. 

Xo other church in modern society has these immense ad- 
vantages. Protestantism has them not. Protestantism is at 
best a bundle of complicated sects. It is simply a conglom- 
eration of various interpretations of scripture. It is nothing 
more than a misrepresented bible. Protestantism is only 
three hundred years old. It is a schism, a departure from 
the old church, and it owes the savor of its piety, its noble- 
ness, its grandeur, its sincerity to the ages that lay behind 
it in the old church from which it came. Protestantism, in 
my poor judgment, has two fatal weaknesses — all protest- 
antism, every form of protestantism — from that of Calvin 
to that of Channing and Buckminster. It builds on the 
bible. Its foundations are a book. It constructs all its 
ideas upon a more or less shadowy theory of an inspired let- 
ter — a book that for the last hundred years has been 
opened to the assaults of learning, knowledge, criticism and 
scholarship, which have riddled it through and through so 
completely that we are not sure of the genuinenss of a sin- 



84 O. B. FRO THIN GIIA M. 

gle chapter of it. Its doctrines, its ethics, its religious ideas 
have all been called in question, and have been called in 
question not by idle gossips, not by foolish sentimentalists, 
not by ignorant vagabonds struggling over the fields of lit- 
erature, but by the most earnest, thoroughly trained, con- 
scientious, sincere and learned minds that have ever lived on 
the planet. The questions they have raised cannot be an- 
swered. The doubts they have started never can be put to 
rest. They have, in fact, undermined the very foundations 
of the protestant system, and protestantism is not wise 
enough to keep the book underground as the catholic 
church does, but brings it forward, puts it in our faces, chal- 
lenges our criticism, and claims or pretends to assert that 
doubt has never touched it, that the questions are perfectly 
idle and futile, and not an iota of its authority has ever been 
started. That seems to me a fatal objection. Protestant- 
ism has committed itself to the book and with the book it 
must fall sooner or later, — later, of course, because it will 
take generations yet for these doubts to have filtered down 
through all the levels of intelligence until it gets among the 
common people, but the end is certain. 

Another fatal weakness of protestantism is that it is 
neither of the old nor of the new. The past and future 
struggle in its bosom, as they have struggled from the be- 
ginning. It gave out that it had faith in reason, in free 
thought, but it stopped. It never practised reason ; it never 
believed in free thought. It has set up an iron-bound creed, 
and it has denounced science and philosophy and learning 
just as vigorously and absolutely as if it had stated all these 
things and knew what they meant. Tradition and truth, 
authority and liberty, law and progress, the reign of the idea 
and the reign of the creed have lain side by side unrecon- 



A N IN DEPENDEN T MINIS TR Y. 85 

ciled in its mind. These two powers are tearing protestant- 
ism to pieces. They are always struggling together visibly 
every Sunday. In orthodox pulpits the science, the phil- 
osophy, the progress, the intelligence of the day must be 
called in question. These open problems are discussed be- 
fore all the world. An uneasiness, a settled feeling of trou- 
ble is at the heart of the old system. It is not at rest. It 
is not composed. 

Therefore I say the refuge of old-fashioned piety will be 
in the old church rather than in the new, in Romanism rather 
than in Protestantism. Mark you, I say the old-fashioned 
piety — I do not say the new piety — I say the passive piety, 
the piety of childhood, the piety of the wan, wasted, weary 
and troubled heart. 

But what of the new piety? What of the new reverence, 
the new hope, the new faith ? The modern spirit that looks 
forward, that believes in progress, that has faith in man, that 
builds on ideas — what of this? Where is this going? Not 
to Rome, not to Luther, not to Calvin, not to Buckminster 
or Channing, not to any protestant sect, not to any Christ- 
ian denomination. It has another future. It must have an- 
other formation. What shall it be? There are and will be 
more and more people who are unchurched, who are unbe- 
lieving, who wander about vaguely hither and thither, to 
whom religion is an unmeaning phrase suggestive of super- 
stition and of absolute credulities, who detest the priests, 
who will not listen to the preacher, who will not open the 
book. These, I say, will multiply more and more and we 
may expect in the coming generation to see a great exodus 
from all the churches of people who are practically "come- 
outers " not by philosophy, not by thought, not by knowl- 
edge or conviction, but simply because the instinct to wan- 



86 



0. B. FROTHINGHAM. 



der is stronger than the instinct that keeps them at home. 
They are spiritual " tramps," and though a " tramp " may 
start out with the best of purposes and with manly courage 
and determination to do some work wherever he can find it, 
it will not be long before he becomes a vagabond and a beg- 
gar clothed in rags, his shoes worn out and all nobility ex- 
tracted from his soul. This it seems to me to be the danger 
of the general dispersion that is taking place now among 
those who have come to disbelieve in the old theology. 

It seems to me that what we need now is organization, a 
new basis upon which we can ground our superstructure, 
new principles upon which we can coalesce, I will not say 
a creed, because there is no creed at present, but I will say 
something like a denomination, with certain pretty well un- 
derstood articles upon which earnest, faithful, intelligent 
people can agree, can cooperate. 

The new church we see the beginnings of in the new so- 
cieties east and west, in the determination that they, one 
and all, show to do something for humanity. The new Uni- 
tarianism of the east and of the west is becoming less and 
less dogmatic and more and more human. The societies 
are associations of charity ; they are organs of good will ; 
they study social science ; they are engaging in live things. 
The Society of Ethical Culture in this city supports a kin- 
dergarten for poor children, free to all who shall come, a 
workingmen's lyceum, where the working people will be in- 
structed, if they wish to be, in the best knowledge that per- 
tains to their condition. Orthodox churches are catching 
the same idea and working it out. One and all they are 
conspiring as a society of beneficence. I have been in par- 
lors where were met together representatives of different 
faiths, orthodox and unorthodox, for the purpose of con- 



AN INDEPENDENT MINI ST R Y. 87 

sidering the wants of the poor in New York and out of it. 
I have sat in company with the rector of Grace Church on 
one side and the minister of the Society for Ethical Culture 
on the other, and all of us, apparently, without the least 
suspicion that we were disbelievers and foes on Sunday, 
putting our little wisdom together to see what we could do 
for working men, for the landless, the unemployed, the 
waifs, the astrays of modern society. This is an omen ; 
this is an indication ; this shows how, one and all, people 
are looking not towards creed but towards deed, how a human 
spirit is coming to pervade even Christendom. 

But all this is provisional and tentative. This is in the 
way of experiment merely. We must have intelligent or- 
ganization, some speculative basis, some ground upon which 
we can stand, some open pathway along which we can walk, 
some well understood conclusions which shall hold us all 
together. I am not prepared to say what this shall be. I 
do not know myself what they can be ; but I do know this, 
I have read enough and pondered enough upon this to know 
that science — social science, social philosophy are at work, 
busily harmonizing things, learning what they are, what can 
be done, how it should be done ; and I believe that the time 
is not far distant when those who are ready to work for hu- 
manity can work together, not as a scattered body, but as a 
close, compact phalanx. 

To-day, as it seems to me, the last word of dogmatic in- 
dividualism is spoken from this place. When we come to- 
gether again, it will be with a resolution and determination 
and purpose to organize, to close up ranks, and to present 
a firm, persistent front towards all demoralizing errors and 
false vagaries that are tearing the modern world to pieces. 
Every year, as I grow older, a new sense comes to me of 



88 0. B. FR0TH1NGHAM. 

the responsibility that is upon every man and woman to do 
something, however little, in any way that is possible for 
him to do — something to rectify what is going wrong, to 
make straight what is crooked, to sweeten what is bitter in 
our social condition. 

We are in an age of transition, in a world of open 
questions, of unsolved problems, where doubts and fears, 
questionings and cross-questionings flit to and fro in the air, 
where multitudes wander bewildered and perplexed. I am 
not conceited enough to think that I can set anything right 
that is wrong, that I can answer any questions or throw any 
light upon any unsolved problems ; but this 1 feel sure of, 
that nobody who means to do something, who is simply sin- 
cere and earnest, can fail to make a positive contribution 
towards the future. 

And now let me say that I leave this work for a time in 
your hands. For twenty years I have done what I could 
with such moderate gifts as I possessed, with such earnest- 
ness as was vouchsafed to me, to throw a gleam of light here 
and there upon dark places, to make things that seemed to 
me crooked a little straighter, and things that seemed to me 
wrong a little lighter, to hold up hope and support courage 
as well as I could, being but one. Some of you have listen- 
ed to what I have had to say through all these years. You 
know what it is ; you know what I have meant ; you know 
what I have purposed. I leave it with you while I am gone 
and can speak to you no word. I shall believe this, that all 
those who have given me credit for honesty of purpose, for 
intelligence, for earnestness, will do what they can to justify 
themselves in their own way, not in mine. I do not tell 
them what they ought to do or what I wish them to do. 
But whether they go to church or not, however they use 



A N 1NDEPENDEN T MINIS TR Y. 89 

their time on Sunday, let me believe that there is not a man 
or a woman who has listened to me with any confidence or 
with any trust, who will waste, squander the precious hours 
of the Sunday, that dear legacy which has been left to us 
from the bygone years, and which the world sorely needs to 
have employed. Employ it as you will, but do not give 
those grand hours to idleness, to sleep or to vacancy. Let 
them not run to waste, but let them drop their golden con- 
tributions into the treasury of the world's intelligence with 
hope and love. 

In the meantime, let^us never have hours of despondency 
or hopelessness. Let us be ashamed of ourselves if we ever 
feel like doubting that the future years will be better than 
these last twenty years have been ; for the powers that work 
for the regeneration of men are immense in their scope and 
in their potency. 

The press, the literature, the art, the free intelligence and 
untrammelled integrity of our modern society cannot fail to 
pulverize with their invisible tread all obstacles, stone and 
brazen, which lie in the path of human progress. The laws 
of the intellectual world may be taken for granted. The 
voice of the individual speaker may cease, may be silenced 
forever, but the eternal word will always be articulate. 



